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Contents:
DDD 72.52 Recorded: Musaion of the University of Pretoria and St Alban’s Cathedral, Pretoria, October 1999 and October 2000 This CD offers a representative selection from the broad repertoire of the UP Camerata, and thus includes well-known works from the Western art canon, contemporary European choral music, and modern music from Africa. Anton Bruckner’s motet Os Justi, Giuseppe Verdi’s Our Father and Felix Mendelssohn’s setting of Psalm 100 (Jauchzet dem Herrn) are so well known as to need no further introduction here. The Estonian composer Arvo Pärt (1935) has in the past two decades become one of the most successful of all contemporary composers. He began as a composer in the neo-classical idiom, moved to serialism in the 1960s, but then underwent a radical shift, moving to an austere, modal-influenced style. The majority of his works are religious in inspiration. He is represented here by his Magnificat of 1989. Veljo Tormis (1930) is the second Estonian composer recorded here. His works, especially those for choir, are characterized by a particularly sensitive treatment of folkloric matter. His Curse Upon Iron was written in 1972, and its musical material is intentionally similar in structure to folk melody. The work’s premise is that everything created by man may turn against him, if he uses it without attention to the concomitant ethical responsibilities. If a people becomes alienated from ancient truths, then this can end in disaster for the whole nation. The incantation to iron from the ninth-century rune of ‘Kalevala’ serves as the basis for the text. Sven-Eric Johanson (1919-1997) was one of the most prolific Swedish composers of the 20th century, with twelve symphonies, several stage works, numerous concerti and a host of choral music to his name. For most of his life, he worked as a church musician in Gothenburg. Hindemith exerted a particular influence on his music, though Johanson later turned to an idiosyncratic use of serialism. In Dilemma (1968), he juxtaposes good and evil. The women’s voices sing the ‘good’ words, the men’s voices the ‘evil’ words. The Swedish composer Thomas Jennefelt was born in 1954 and studied at the Royal College of Music in Stockholm. He was himself a choral singer for many years, and his oeuvre is dominated by vocal music. Villarosa sarialdi was composed in 1994. Instead of being governed by the interpretation of a text, Jennefelt wanted his composition to be shaped by the needs of the choir and its voices. He thus first wrote the music, then afterwards wrote his own nonsense text for it. The text may look like some strange form of Italian or Latin, but in fact means nothing at all. To the Mothers of Brazil is an arrangement by Gunnar Eriksson (*1936) of the piece of the same name by the Swedish jazz pianist Lars Jansson (*1951). It is specifically a hymn to the Virgin Mary – the Salve regina – but is meant as a hymn to all those mothers who have lost their children through the machinations of a cruel state. Of his Pseudo-Yoik, the contemporary Finnish composer Jaakko Mäntyjärvi has written as follows: ‘The Pseudo-Yoik has nothing to do with genuine traditional Lappish or Saame yoik. The piece is rather an impression of a stereotype, the stereotype that most Finns associate With Lapland and its people. The text exists merely to give form to the music and is meaningless, although the laws of probability dictate that there must exist an obscure South American Indian language in which it makes perfectly good sense.’ This CD also offers insights into contemporary composition in South Africa. Niel van der Watt, represented here by his I am the voice of Africa, was born in 1962 in Pretoria. He began instrumental tuition at the age of ten, and also gained much experience in choral singing (this being as much a tradition among the different peoples of South Africa as it is, say, in England). He studied at the University of Pretoria, and was awarded prizes in composition and in harmony and counterpoint. He took his Master’s degree in composition under Prof. Stefans Grové, and his doctorate in musicology with a thesis on the songs of Gerald Finzi. Since 1987, Niel van der Watt has taught at Pretoria Boys High School. Roelof Temmingh is one of the most successful, and certainly one of the most prolific, composers in South Africa today. His oeuvre includes three operas composed in the past seven years: Enoch, the Prophet of God (1995), Ancestral Voices (1996) and Buchuland (1998). Temmingh studied under Karlheinz Stockhausen, Mauricio Kagel, György Ligeti and Iannis Xenakis at the International Music Institute in Darmstadt, and computer music at the Institute for Sonology in Utrecht. His early works were influenced by the avant-garde, though his more recent music makes evident a move to a more accessible style, as can be heard in the Hymn recorded here. ‘The act of composition’, he says, ‘glides around in music’s most inspiring domain, the great carefree world between the old, distant boundaries of tonality and atonality.’ He is currently an associate professor at the University of Stellenbosch. His works have been performed throughout Europe, Australia, Canada, and the United States.
Page revised 06.08.03 |
