Nordic Tour:

Fredag den 26. august 2011: Schæffergården, Gentofte, Danmark
Søndag den 28. august 2011: Allhelgonakyrkan, Lund, Sverige
Søndag den 28. august 2011: S:t Petri Kyrka, Malmø, Sverige
Fredag den 16. september 2011: Skálholt Kirke, Reykavik, Island
Lørdag den 17. september 2011: Langholtskirkja, Reykjavik, Island
Søndag den 18. september 2011: Trefoldighets Kirke, Oslo, Norge

NORTH ROOM

The concert takes us on a musical journey to the Nordic countries and the characteristic Nordic spaces: The vast skies above, the special light, the space of nature and of the arts, of silence and of music. We will also pay visit to the spaces inhabited by life, death and faith. The Nordic light and the Nordic sound is omnipresent, because all the music is composed by Nordic composers.

Tyst är det rum, där Jordens röster höjas
(Silent is the space where the voices of the Earth are raised)

Swedish poet Pär Lagerkvist’s hushed poem, set to music by Gabriella Gullin, transports us to the waste, cosmic space. But Norwegian as well as Icelandic hymns of praise makes us feel that life and joy breaks through and fills the space.

Grieg’s large-scale and weighty psalms are like the manifestation of man in space and in life with his faith and longing for eternity and the ensuing dichotomy between earthly and heavenly matters.

Sven-David Sandström’s major choral work, Hear my prayer, O Lord is based on Purcell’s composition which was written more than 300 years earlier. Sandström’s work conjures up the furthest corners of the space of music and aesthetics – from the oldest to the newest, from the greatest depth to the highest peak, and from the smallest matter to the greatest.

Summer with its wonderful light even at night is allotted its own space at this concert with Jørgen Jersild’s transparent De lyse nætter (The light summer nights) for women’s choir. In the space of this music we are made aware of the fact that in our part of the world we live with and for the light and must appreciate it and use to the full when it is there – in music, poetry, art, and in the lives we live.

Composer Bent Sørensen says of his work In Paradisum that when he visited Gothenburg Cathedral, the experience of the gilded angelic gleam that fills the cathedral space incited him to write a kind of angelic music.

“Tota pulcra es” by Norwegian composer Ola Gjeilo depicts the joyous message of the Virgin Mary’s immaculate conception of the Saviour of the World. The beauty of this musical adoration of the Virgin brings together the spaces of day and night, heaven and earth, music and language, the light and the dark. And then the concert ends where it began – with lyrics by Pär Lagerkvist.

It is most beautiful when twilight falls.
All the love the sky holds
lies gathered within an obscure light