Latvian Radio Choir - Mythes Etoiles
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Latvian Radio Choir · Kaspars Putninš, conductor
The Latvian Radio Choir has earned an enviable reputation among the virtuoso choirs today. The album 'Mythes Étoliés' contains both exiting new music from the Scandinavian/Baltic area and modern classics for a cappella choir.
Since the middle of the 20th century there has been an exponential development in new vocal techniques as applied to choral singing. 'Concrescence', a project initiated by Norwegian composer Lasse Thoresen at the Norwegian Academy of Music, has focused on new vocal timbres, non-tempered tonality, ornamentation techniques from Scandinavian folk songs and Mongolian overtone singing. This release is the first to present some of the resulting works on CD with the Latvian Radio Choir, who has been a key artistic resource for the project.
The main work on the recording is Thoresen's 'Mythes Étoilés', a large-scale, three-movement setting of a poem by Giacinto Scelsi, better known as one of the original composers of the 20thcentury. In his setting of Scelsi"s deeply Symbolist poem, Thoresen has surely created a major utterance for unaccompanied voices, a mastepiece of similar importance to Olivier Messiaen"s Cinq Rechants or Iannis Xenakis"s Nuits. A modern classic of advanced choral repertoire follows on the recording: György Ligeti's 'Lux Aeterna', well known through its appearance in Kubrick's '2001 - a space odyssey'.
Latvian composer Martinš Vilums" choral work 'gaw ek-dad kard' ("On the conflict waged with the primeval ox") was inspired by the cosmological texts of the Bundahishn, relating to how life was created out of a primeval ox. This is a highly dramatic piece that seems to evoke the rituals of a remote primeval past. Swedish composer Anders Hillborg's minimalist choral piece 'Mouyayoum' is scored for 16-part mixed choir, and has attained the status of a modern classic. Described as "cosmic trance" music, it is a wordless - but vowel-full - exploration of vocal texture.
During the last six years of his life John Cage wrote a large number of so-called "number pieces". The effect of the beautiful and indeed radiant 'Four2' is of sustained, extremely long-held sound-continuums to which voices are added or subtracted, creating vibrant overtones and mysterious inner motion within the sounds. The works of Estian composer Toivo Tulev also possess a mystical, incantatory dimension. Hi strives to balance the expressionistic aspects of contemporary music with the sense of the eternal to be discovered in sacred music, as we hear it in his 'Tanto Gentile'.