Concert programme - Vägar under oss

Tonight’s concert has the name “Vägar under oss”, “Roads below us”. Our conductor, Elisa, tells of the work with the programme that she at the very start came to think of the different crossroads that we meet in life, real and metaphorical alike. Roads and other fairways guide us from one place to another. They can be major thoroughfares or small footpaths, well or unknown, and you can go with or against the stream. To travel can also be dangerous. It requires planning, courage, and prudence to avoid crevices and disease.

To help in finding footholds in the darkening autumn nights, we begin the concert with Stars by the Latvian composer Ēriks Ešenvalds (1977-), written for male voices and pitched drinking glasses. The lyrics, which describe a breathtakingly clear starry night, stems from 1922 and the pen of Sara Teasdale (1884–1933). Teasdale is a well-liked poet for the choir, familiar from e.g. Cecilia Damström’s (1988-) At Teasdale’s, part of recent repertoire.

Our journey continues within the Baltics with the following work, the powerful Kaksipühendus (“double dedication”) by the Estonian Veijo Tormis (1930–2017). The texts carry echoes of the “singing revolution”, which led to the restoration of independence of the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania from the Soviet Union. The texts for the two parts, Ühte laulu tahaks laulda (“I want to sing a song”) and Tähed (“stars”) are from two great Estonian poets, Gustav Suits (1883–1956) and Marie Under (1883–1980).

The programme contains some works composed by the choir’s earlier conductor Nils-Eric Fougstedt (1910–1961, conducted 1946–1950) to commemorate his 110th anniversary. The first of these is Näktergalen (“the nightingale”), to lyrics by the Fenno-Swedish poet Bertel Gripenberg (1878–1947) which describe a summer night’s fever dream and the relief at the end of the disease. The solo is sung by first base (baryton) Hannu Kauhanen.

After defeating the affliction within, we meet the external forces of nature in Jean Sibelius’s (1865–1957) Ute hörs stormen (“Outside the storm can be heard”), one of the two songs that Sibelius set to texts by the physician and member of the choir Gösta Schybergson (1893–1918), who was killed during the Finnish Civil War. The text describes an emotional exchange between a suitor and their beloved.

When all is lost the will to live still remains, a theme explored from a first-person perspective in the Englishman Ralph Vaughan Williams’s (1872–1958) song The Vagabond. The work is a new addition to the choir’s repertoire, and originates from a nine-song cycle set to texts from the Scottish author Robert Louis Stevenson’s (1850–1894) collection Songs of Travel and Other Verses.

We stay in England for the next song, I Love My Love, this time lamenting a faraway beloved. The melody comes from a Cornish folksong written down by the folksong collector George Gardiner (1852–1910) and arranged by Gustav Holst (1874–1934). We leave to the listener to decide whether the Bedlam referred to in the song is one of the several English villages of the same name or the Royal Betlehem Hospital, known as an insane asylum since the 1400s and the likely origin of the word “bedlam”.

The other song by Fougstedt is Skymningsadagio (“twilight adagio”), a melancholy fairytale image set to a poem by the theatre manager and poet Karin Mandelstam (1908–1982). After all the days of wandering and waiting, of ill health, struggle, victories, and defeats that we’ve met in the earlier songs, a sleepless night may seem like a minor annoyance; but for the sleepless person it rarely is.

Stjärnenatten (“starry night”), composed by the Australian Matthew Whittall (1975-) for the Academic Male Voice Choir of Helsinki’s 180th anniversary, could be called the main piece of this concert. The piece is complex, akin to a symphonic poet for male voices, and the unsettled, mystical, and at times ecstatic lyrics are a collage of Edith Södergran’s (1892–1923) poems. Where the ringing background music in Stars is created with the help of glasses, Whittalls piece contains a shifting overtone texture which is created by the choristers themselves. Solos are performed by first base (barytone) Matias Ingman and first tenor Jonatan Höglund.

With these eight pieces we wish you good health, luck in your travels, and starry nights.

Thank you for participating in the concert, and we hope to see you soon in the same concert hall!