Madrigals
The madrigal as a musical form emerged during the Renaissance in Italy. Madrigals were characterised by the emotional emphasis on each phrase, even down to a single word. The Swedish Radio Choir presents six different stories by six different composers. The choir performs some pieces all together and some in smaller ensembles, all depending on what suits each piece the best.
One evening, Folke Rabe was at a club evening arranged by the Swedish Society of Composers, listening to an analysis of Ann Jäderlund’s poetry. “It struck me that the repetition of words that you make use of,” he later wrote to Jäderlund, “could be used in setting text to music in a way that would create a very intimate relationship between text and music. I had in mind to chose a certain sound or combination of notes for each word used, thus repeating this very sound and these notes every time this word is sung.”
In September 2009, six of Rabe’s twelve songs premièred. He had been considering what to call the songs, which were written for the vocal quartet Vox, when one of the members phoned to ask whether he thought the music would be suitable for a madrigal programme. “And that question was akin to a revelation for me! Of course, it is indeed madrigals, that I’ve been working on!” Rabe’s Madrigals was his last composition.
The Slovenian Katarina Pustinek Rakar let herself be inspired by her 429 year older countryman, Jacobus Gallus, also known as Jacob Handl. In the 1620s, his Moralia madrigals, with lyrics from a collection of medieval aphorisms in Latin, were immensely popular, not least in Sweden. One of the texts in Gallus’s music, Libertas animi cibus, spoke to Pustinek Rakar with a particular intensity. “Freedom is the best seasoning///; without it nothing tastes good. Your own bread is sweeter than all the world’s honey,” two choirs sing.
In a Gestapo prison in French Vichy, the resistance fighter and museum director Jean Cassou exercised his freedom of thought by creating poetry in the darkness of his cell. Each night, he wrote half a sonnet and it was not until right before his release that he gained access to pen and paper and was able to write down what he had memorised thus far. The texts reached the composer Darius Milhaud, who had managed to escape at the last minute with his wife and child from occupied France to the United States. Milhaud’s six sonnets, Six sonnets composés au secret par Jean Cassou was composed in California in 1946.
Almost precisely 40 years later, 1,300 km to the north along the same American west coast, at a ramshackle 50 dollar piano on a remote island and with a view of the Canadian wilderness, the fire-chord was born. That became the starting point of Morten Lauridsen’s choral cycle, Madrigali: Six ‘Fire Songs’, full of fiery love, dissonance and verbal imagery. Simply put, Madrigals!
Text: Janna Vettergren
Participants
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.
Marc Korovitch studied at the Sorbonne, the École Normale de Musique in Paris, and the Haute École de Musique in Geneva. Among his mentors were Denis Rouger, Celso Antunes, Michael Gläser, Dominique Rouits, and Colin Metters.
He is regularly invited by various choirs, including ACCENTUS, the Radio France Choir, the SWR Vokalensemble Stuttgart, the Croatian Radio Choir, the NDR Chor, the Europa Chor Akademie, the WDR Chor, the English Voices, the Community of Madrid Choir, the Serbian Radio Choir, the Eric Ericson Chamber Choir, and the Netherlands Radio Choir.
Korovitch is the youngest conductor to have conducted the Concerto Köln in Germany and on tour in Italy and Poland. He frequently conducts the Hague Chamber Orchestra, the Zagreb Baroque Orchestra, the Berliner Sinfonietta, the Croatian Radio and Television Orchestra, the Montpellier National Orchestra, and the Spanish Radio and Television Orchestra RTVE.
He collaborates with conductors such as Sir Simon Rattle, Herbert Blomstedt, Klaus Mäkelä, Daniel Harding, Lahav Shani, Gustavo Dudamel, Alan Gilbert, Philippe Jordan, Louis Langrée, Leonardo García Alarcón, Laurence Equilbey, Esa-Pekka Salonen, and Jaap van Zweden in halls such as the Philharmonie de Paris, Theater an der Wien, Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg, Lincoln Center in New York, Berwaldhallen in Stockholm, the National Auditorium of Music in Madrid, the Tokyo Opera City, and during major festivals such as the Radio-France festival in Montpellier, the Rencontres Musicales d’Evian, the Mozartwoche in Salzburg, the Baltic Sea Festival in Stockholm, and the Mostly Mozart festival in New York.
He was conductor of the Jeune Chœur de Paris from 2017 to 2024 and principal conductor of the Chœur de l’Orchestre de Paris between 2022 and 2023. In 2019, he was appointed choir master of the Swedish Radio Choir, chief conductor of the Orchestre Colonne in september 2022, of the Montenegro Symphony Orchestra in 2023, and of the Spanish Radio and Television Choir RTVE in 2024.
Passionate about teaching, Korovitch was a professor of choir conducting at the Conservatoire à Rayonnement Régional de Paris and at the Pôle Supérieur Paris Boulogne Billancourt for seven years.
Concert length: 1 h 50 min incl. intermission
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