From the 9th to the 17th of October, the Latvian Radio Choir lead by conductor Sigvards Kļava will embark on a tour of the Netherlands, performing multiple programmes across eight concerts. The concerts will feature one of the 20th century sacred music cornerstones - the genius melodicist Sergei Rachmaninoff’s All-Night Vigil which embodies the very core of the soul of the Eastern Orthodox Church. The Latvian Radio Choir’s recording of the All Night Vigil has earned widespread international acclaim, with the prestigious Gramophone naming it its best recording of February 2013, and the American radio station NRP placing it in its top 25 best albums of the year list. In the summer of 2017, the Latvian Radio Choir debuted in the famous BBC Proms festival, performing the All-Night vigil for their very-well received debut.
The tour also features the great 19th century symphony writer Anton Bruckner’s sacred motets, in which the composer depicts the values of the catholic church, revelations of the sacred journey, and the relationship between the divine and the humanly sincere. The Latvian Radio Choir’s album of Anton Bruckner’s motets released under the label ONDINE has earned praise from such prestigious periodicals as Gramophone, the BBC Music Magazine and Classica.
The Latvian repertoire will be represented by Pēteris Vasks’s Tomtit’s Message - in this work, the composer juxtaposes the uncertainty of life, fear of war and destruction, and the beauty of nature and longing. The repertoire also features Ēriks Ešenvalds world-famous opus A Drop in the Ocean, dedicated to the memory of Mother Theresa and her servitude.
The audiences will also hear the Scottish composer, modern coryphaei James MacMillan’s Miserere. The emotionally charged work guides through an honest confession in front of God, giving us hope and mercy in the finale. Being deeply religious, Arvo Pärt also mainly uses sacred texts for his choir works, including Nunc dimittis: a canticle praising Saint Simeon, taken from the second chapter of the Gospel of Luke.
The programme also features such 20th century musical gems as the modernist genius György Ligeti’s transparent sonic web of Lux aeterna, Francis Poulenc’s dedication to the memory of his father: Mass in G Major, Sven-David Sandström’s Hear my Prayer, O Lord, which is based on a work of the same name by Henry Purcell, and Olivier Messiaen’s Praise to the eternity of Jesus from his Quartet for the End of Time. It has been re-arranged for choir by Clytus Gottwald, using Messiaen’s own poetry about deep longing for Jesus, immersing oneself in the rainbow of divine love and the realm of silence. And the Ukrainian living classic Valentyn Silvestrov’s Two Sacred Songs is an example of warm melodicism with a light-filled texture and transparency.