The Swedish Radio Choir at the Nordic museum: Tones under Stellar Vaults

sep.

Saturday 21:30

EVENT DATE PASSED

For the final concert in the Baltic Sea Festival series, the Swedish Radio Choir under chief conductor Kaspar Putniņš will enter the imposing great hall at Nordiska Museet, only a stone’s throw from Berwaldhallen. The programme will feature music from the Nordic and Baltic countries including the Swedish premier of Britta Byströms To måner.

Participants

Swedish Radio Choir

32 professional choristers make up the Swedish Radio Choir: a unique, dynamic instrument hailed by music-lovers and critics all over the world. The Swedish Radio Choir performs at Berwaldhallen, concert hall of the Swedish Radio, as well as on tours all over the country and the world. Also, they are heard regularly by millions of listeners on Swedish Radio P2, Berwaldhallen Play and globally through the EBU.

The award-winning Latvian conductor Kaspars Putniņš was appointed Chief Conductor of the Swedish Radio Choir in 2020. Since January 2019, its choirmaster is French orchestral and choral conductor Marc Korovitch, with responsibility for the choir’s vocal development.

The Swedish Radio Choir was founded in 1925, the same year as Sweden’s inaugural radio broadcasts, and gave its first concert in May that year. Multiple acclaimed and award-winning albums can be found in the choir’s record catalogue. Late 2023 saw the release of Kaspars Putniņš first album with the choir: Robert Schumann’s Missa sacra, recorded with organist Johan Hammarström.
Kaspar Putniņš, music director

Kaspars Putniņš is Chief Conductor of the Swedish Radio Choir since 2020, and newly appointed Chief Conductor of the Latvian Radio Choir with whom he has worked closely for more than 30 years. He was formerly Chief Conductor of the Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir in 2014–2021. He regularly appears with the RIAS Kammerchor, SWR Vokalensemble Stuttgart, Collegium Vocale Gent, Danish National Vocal Ensemble & Choir, Netherlands Radio Choir, NDR Vokalensemble Hamburg, Chorwerk Ruhr, among others.

While Putniņš is a skilled interpreter of a wide choral repertoire, from Renaissance polyphony through to romantic music, his foremost goal has always been promoting new and outstanding choral music. He has forged close relationships with Baltic and Nordic composers including Maija Einfelde, Mārtiņš Viļums, Gundega Šmite, Toivo Tulev, Lasse Thoresen, Gavin Bryars and Andris Dzenitis. He has also initiated several drama projects in collaboration with visual and theatre artists, and has worked extensively with young singers and conductors, including as Artistic Director of the Tenso Europe Chamber Choir in 2013–2017.

Autumn 2023 saw the release of Putniņš’ first album recording with the Swedish Radio Choir: Robert Schumann’s Missa sacra and Vier doppelchörige Gesänge, recorded with Swedish organist Johan Hammarström. His wide-ranging discography also includes recordings of Pēteris Vasks’ Māte saule, Jonathan Harvey’s The Angels, Sergei Rachmaninoff’s All-Night Vigil and Alfred Schnittke’s Concerto for Choir. His recording with the Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir of Schnittke’s Psalms of Repentance and Arvo Pärt’s Magnificat and Nunc dimittis was awarded both the Gramophone Award and Diapason d’Or in 2018.

Kaspars Putniņš has been awarded two of Latvia’s foremost awards for his musicianship: the Grand Music Prize Lielā mūzikas balva and the Council of Ministers Award for Achievements in Culture and Science. For his contributions to Estonian music life as Chief Conductor of the Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir, he was awarded the Cultural Endowment of Estonia’s Annual Award in 2019. Putniņš grew up in Riga, Latvia, and was only 26 years old when he was first hired as conductor of the Latvian Radio Choir.
Sofia Niklasson, soprano
Jenny Ericsson, soprano

Sopranen Jennie Eriksson Nordin är sedan 2013 anställd i Radiokören och därtill verksam som solist och sångpedagog. Hon har framträtt med ensembler som Sveriges Radios Symfoniorkester, re:Baroque, Drottningholms Barockensemble, Stockholm Sinfonietta och Kungliga Hovkapellet. Hon anlitas ofta som solist i de stora sakrala verken som Bachs Matteuspassion, Händels Messias och Mozarts Requiem. Som operasolist har hon uppträtt i bland annat Byrgitta av Carl Unander-Scharin vid Vadstena-Akademien, Rameaus Fedra och odjuret på Folkoperan och Strauss den yngres Läderlappen med Stockholms Operettensemble. Jennie är utbildad vid Musikhögskolan i Piteå och på Operahögskolan i Stockholm.
Lars Johansson Brissman, bass

Programme

Concert length: 1 hour (no intermission)

KNUT NYSTEDT: Immortal Bach (Komm, süßer Tod)

5 min
BO HOLTEN: Drømte mik aen drøm i nat

2 min
ARVO PÄRT: Magnificat

6 min

Soloist: Sofia Niklasson, soprano

In Für Alina and Spiegel im Spiegel Arvo Pärt introduced his “tintinnabuli” (from Latin “bell”) technique. Pärt was inspired by the hypnotic, meditative elements of liturgical chant. Pärt is himself deeply religious, and his faith is central to his music. His Magnificat from 1989 is another example of tintinnabuli. According to conductor Paul Hillier it is the work in which Pärt makes the most elegant use of the technique.

”The idea behind tintinnabuli came from a desire for a highly reduced soundscape, which can only be measured in millimetres,” Arvo Pärt’s wife Nora recounts. “The listener ultimately pays full attention. When the music stops this becomes especially poignant as you hear yourself breathe, your heartbeat or the whirr of a lamp.”

Magnificat is written as a single movement divided into sections according to how Pärt has divided up the different voices, almost in the form of alternating solo and ensemble parts. This is how he creates tonal variation in this piece, which is meant to be perceived as a continuous presences, as if time has stopped. The text is sometimes referred to as the Virgin Mary’s song of praise and is taken from the New Testament Gospel of Luke. The words are uttered by Mary during her visit to John the Baptist’s mother Elizabeth while they were both pregnant. It begins: “My soul magnifies the Lord and my spirit has rejoiced in God my Saviour.”

Text: David Saulesco
JEAN SIBELIUS: Rakastava

8 min

Soloists: Jennie Eriksson Nordin, soprano & Karl Söderström, bass

Apart from the seven unearthly poems and several equally delightful symphonic poems, the Finnish composer Jean Sibelius wrote many choral works. Choral music was a common thread throughout his life. He wrote his first choral songs in the 1880s, when he was studying composition at the Helsinki academy of music (later the Sibelius Academy). He wrote his last songs in 1954, at the age of 89.

After his success with his first major choral work, Venematka, in 1893, he went on the following year to compose his potentially most ground-breaking and most frequently performed a capella work, Rakastava. The text is taken from the first volume of Kanteletar, a collection of lyrical, epic folk poems and ballads, a companion work to the national epic of Finland, Kalevala, both by the Finnish author Elias Lönnrot.

To a contemporary listener, the music is light on the ear, but together with Venematka, Rakastava was at the time an important gateway to an entirely new era in Finnish choral music. They were technically difficult and overwhelmingly modern ¬– almost strange. One critic wrote: “Sibelius’s songs are very strange. The first time you hear them you can hardly make them out, although on closer examination you find a great deal of beauty. […] But most beautiful of all is Rakastava, despite some odd and impudent harmonies that you are tempted to assume are misprints.”

Like many of Sibelius’s choral works from the 1890s, Rakastava was originally written for man’s choir. Five years later, in 1898, Sibelius rearranged the piece for mixed choir, and in 1911 he created an instrumental version for string orchestra. The year 1898 was also when five of his works for mixed choir were published in a volume entitled Sävelistö, kaikuja laulustamme (roughly translated as A collection of melodies, echoes of our singing), among them was Rakastava.

Hedvig Ljungar
JØRGEN JERSILD: Min yndlingsdal

4 min
EDVARD GRIEG: Hvad est du dog skjøn

6 min
JAN SANDSTRÖM: Stora gåtan

5 min

Many know Jan Sandström from A Motorbike Odyssey, a trombone concerto where the soloist makes a dramatic entrance on a motorcycle. Many choral singers have also sung his serene, almost meditative arrangement of the Praetorius’ hymn Es ist ein Ros entsprungen, an emotional mainstay with Christmas concert audiences.

When Kaspars Putniņš, conductor of the Swedish Radio Choir, called Sandström to commission a work for the Baltic Sea Festival in the form of a tribute to the natural landscape that links the countries around the Baltic Sea: the sea, nature, the forests and the changing seasons. Sandström began to search for suitable texts, and he found in Tomas Tranströmer’s poetry the elements that communicate Sandström’s favourite forms of expression; simplicity and subtle tonal shifts that convey parallel realities. The result is Den stora gåtan (The Great Enigma), based on six poems in from Suite 11 in Tranströmer’s eponymous suite of haikus.

“Although each poem is an experience in itself, they appear to be linked by a common motivation, or core. The sea, God’s wind in your back and apple trees are central. It all comes together in the words that became the title also of the choral work – The Great Enigma,” according to Sandström.

Karin Ekedahl
BRITTA BYSTRÖM: To måner - Swedish Premiere

5 min
ANNA-KARIN KLOCKAR: Limu, lima

2 min

The Swedish Radio Choir at the Nordic museum: Tones under Stellar Vaults

Participants

Swedish Radio Choir

Kaspar Putniņš, music director

Sofia Niklasson, soprano

Jenny Ericsson, soprano

Lars Johansson Brissman, bass

Programme