Following studies at the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki, Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho sought out the Institute for Research and Coordination in Acoustics/Music (IRCAM) in Paris in the 1980s, where she immersed herself in electroacoustic music and French spectral music. Her early pieces are based on interplay between orchestra and taped electronics, and often consist of dense masses of sound going through slow changes.

Saariaho has transferred the same viewpoint to vocal music. Her opera L’Amour de loin, directed by Peter Sellars, was highly celebrated when it premiered at the Salzburg Festival in 2000. In 2001 Saariaho wrote Tag des Jahrs for choir and electronics, a piece based on four poems by Friedrich Hölderlin.. . In a programme note Saariaho writes as follows:

‘I have been familiar with the late poems of Hölderlin for some time now and used some of them for several little pieces. The idea for Tag des Jahrs for choir came to me a few years ago when someone very dear to me suffered a cerebral haemorrhage and communication with her acquired a new logic (or lack thereof), as she no longer had any sense of time or place. I do not know what had happened to Hölderlin, for he signed huis poems under different dates, decade, even centuries from the time in which he lived, and under the name of Scardanelli. I nevertheless acquired a new insight into his poems as visions of lived moments that pass in the twinkling of an eye and then vanish or transform into new, intensive moments. Our minds are full of such clear, sensuous moments, and they in fact make up our own experience of the life we live.’

Like in many other pieces, Saariaho has used nature as the starting point for her composition: ‘I wanted to expand the sound world in the direction of nature that is so present in these poems. Hence the material consisting not only of taped human voice but also of birds, the wind and other nature sounds.’

Tag des Jahrs is dedicated to Kaija Saariaho’s mother.

Anna Hedelius

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

’To every thing there is a season,
and a time to every purpose under the heaven.’

These are the first lines in the Bibel verse which I have used for my composition. It is a very poetical text, from Ecclesiastes 3, in which the repetitive words ’a time to…’ forms a sort of refrain that creates a musical form in itself. There is no obvious message in this Bible Verse, but in a few, sparse lines, the whole diversity and richness of human life is uncovered. When I set music to it, I also thought about it as an image of music itself: a space where all doors are open, where everything has a place.

Female choir and violin: what an attractive combination of lines in high register! In my piece, you can hear the violin sail freely above the singers, like a kite to which the choir hold the line. At other times, the violin joins the choir, as one voice among the others.

’To every thing there is a season’ is about nine minutes in lenght and is dedicated to The Netherlands Female Youth Choir and Janine Jansen.

Britta Byström

Latvian composer Pēteris Vasks’ music is characterised by effusion, and revolves around global and timeless issues. Birth and death, hatred and forgiveness, harmony and dissonance are recurring themes in his work, in differing ways. Hope and belief in the final victory of good over evil is a running theme throughout his compositions.

‘Music is the most powerful of art forms, as it most easily reaches the divine. Music is an abstraction, but sound has the ability to reach the soul and express something that can’t be said in words’, he has said.

Vasks’ atmospheric choral pieces oscillate between dramatic passion and harmonic stillness. Three Poems consists of three choral pieces with lyrics by Polish-American poet Czesław Miłosz, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1980. Vasks lies acquiescently down next to Miłosz’ words with exacting harmonies and complex rhythms that realize? the varying ambiences of the poems.

In Window, the imperceptible transformations of an apple tree changing from sapling to mature fruit tree are depicted contemplatively and dreamily. So Little describes how man is torn between hope and glimmering despair with a haunting polyphony, while a light and hopeful spirit characterises the memory of an interaction with a hare in Encounter.

In Three Poems, Vasks confirms his belief that ‘harmony is possible, at least in music’. The original performance of the piece was given by the Hilliard Ensemble in 1994.

Anna Hedelius

He was England’s big symphonist, Ralph Vaughan Williams, with no less than nine symphonies in his catalogue. But his oeuvre also includes opera, ballet, chamber and choral music, created during a period of 60 years. A composer with a belief in making music as accessible as possible to as many people as possible, and whose musical moods stretch from calm to stormy, and from enigmatic to effervescent.

Thanks to his interest in, and influence from, English Renaissance music, and not least folk music, Vaughan Williams created something of a break in the trend of English art music, which had a strong German influence at the time. It took time for him to remove himself from the German heritage, but studies with composer Maurice Ravel helped him find his own voice.

To us, his hyper-romantic, pastoral romance for violin and orchestra, The Lark Ascending, is likely one of his most famous pieces. Originally, The Lark Ascending is a poem of 122 lines of verse by English Victorian poet George Meredith, who was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature many times. The poem inspired Vaughan Williams to write music with the same title, music that has become significantly better known than Meredith’s poetry, and that combines two of Vaughan Williams’ big passions: poetry and the violin.

The original version from 1914 was thus written for violin and piano, but was orchestrated six years later by the composer, becoming the most played version by far. Here, a further reworking is presented, now for violin and choir, commissioned by the Swedish Chamber Choir and its conductor Simon Phipps. The choir takes over the orchestra’s accompaniment, and also sings George Meredith’s lyrics.

Karin Ekedahl