Musikfest Stuttgart | Latvian Radio Choir | Riga Saxophone Quartet

Members

Latvian Radio Choir

Riga Saxophone Quartet

Conductor Sigvards Kļava

Organized by the Stuttgart International Bach Academy, this year’s Musikfest Stuttgart festival programme will feature the Latvian Radio Choir and the Riga Saxophone Quartet who will perform on June 25 in the Stuttgart St. Eberhard cathedral with a concert programme which focuses on human nature. From hope to faith, courage, and freedom, peaking in the French composer Francis Poulenc’s cantata for a double choir Figure humaine. During the nazi occupation of France, Poulenc was secretly being sent Paul Éluard’s poems which express muted tales of suffering of the French people and their hope of the triumph of liberty over tyranny. On the day that Paris was liberated in 1944, Poulenc hung the French flag out of his window, and his newly written piece alongside the flag. Liberté - this is the word that Poulenc ends his choir masterpiece with.

Using Bach’s song Komm Süsser Tod as the basis, in his work Immortal Bach, Knut Nystedt has achieved a special sense of infinity as a confirmation of the immortality of Bach’s music. Meanwhile, Sven-David Sandström has reshaped Henry Purcell’s choir work Hear my prayer, O, Lord into extreme expression and dramatism.

Arvo Part’s Seven Magnificat-Antiphons have been composed in a strict tintinnabuli technique, yet each part reveals its own character, texture, atmosphere, and the composer’s approach to the catholic liturgical text.

The Riga Saxophone quartet will perform the graciousness of baroque through Johann Sebastian Bach’s Canon BWV 1073 and Henry Purcell’s unusual Fantasia Upon One Note. Throughout the whole piece, the tenor part only plays the note C while the other voices conjure polyphonic arabesques..

For the basis of his opus for choir and saxophone quartet On the dignity of man, the contemporary German composer Bernd Frank has chosen the Renaissance philosopher Giovanni Pico della Mirandola’s famous Oration on the Dignity of Man. This philosophic work is considered the manifesto of Renaissance ideas that explores the capabilities and development of man. In the composition, the saxophone quartet symbolises the untamed energy of earth, while the choir’s aleatoric and declamatory chants symbolise the eternal and distant.