Solistkoret and Yuval Weinberg: To the hands

A musical time travel from the 17th century to our time

"This program is in a way like traveling backwards in time, but without leaving the time travel machine", conductor Yuval Weinberg says about the program he is performing when he returns to Oslo for this season's concert with The Norwegian Soloists' Choir and musicians from Ensemble Allegria.

Together they will perform expressive and emotional music written to lyrics full of tension, despair and hope.

Program

Felix Mendelssohn (1809 – 1847): Drei Psalmen
Caroline Shaw (f. 1982): To the hands
Bjørn Andor Drage (f. 1959): Klag-Lied
Evelin Seppar (f. 1986): Seesama meri
Egil Hovland (1924 – 2013): Jerusalem and Laudate dominum
Dietrich Buxtehude (1637 – 1707): Klaglied

In 1674 Dietrich Buxtehude wrote Klag-Lied for the funeral of his father, questioning the meaning death and expressing the deep sorrow of such a lost.

Both Bjørn Andor Drage and Caroline Shaw composed a response to a piece by Buxtehude.

Drage's Klag-Lied intensifies this deep pain and creates a tornado of Cries, mournful singing, and whispers, through which Buxtehude's original music shimmers like a far memory.

Caroline Shaw is one of the most versatile and interesting composers of our days. Based in New York and bringing different musical styles together, Shaw had written for symphony orchestras, chamber ensembles, solo instruments and vocal ensembles.

She is a singer herself and thus she manages to find new ways of producing sounds, structuring the choir in many layers, always with a lyrical and personal quality.

In To the hands Shaw composed a response to Ad manus by Buxtehude. Instead of focusing on the hands of Jesus, she concentrates on our hands as a society, as individuals of a whole. "I will hold you, ever ever will I hold you", addresses the issue of the huge amount of displaced people all over the world, with compassion, with empathy and hope. This is a piece with a lot of light.

In between those early baroque works and their contemporary parallels, Mendelssohn composed his very well known 3 Psalms. Every possible choral technique for the time is being used by Mendelssohn: from a whole choir singing in unison, 4-part choir, soloists, solo quartets and double choir.

All of these help to create the colors needed to communicate those extreme texts, full of tension, despair, anger and again, hope.