compositions
Two Songs from Kalender Röd - 2000 (12 minutes)
Publisher: Chester Music Limited
First performance: Swedish Radio Choir, cond. Stefan Parkman, Swedish Radio Choir 75th anniversary concert, Stockholm, 2 December 2000
Programme Notes:
Commissioned by the Swedish Broadcasting Cooperation for the 75th Anniversary Concert of the Swedish Radio Choir, the piece is set to poems by Ann Jäderlund.
Salonen: ‘I became enchanted with Ann Jäderlund’s poetry because of its sensual intensity and lack of sentimentality. She describes sensations with amazing effectiveness, with few words but with a rhythm that immediately awakens musical associations.
In the first song, Kyss min mun (Kiss my mouth), I tried to give musical shape to verbal images such as 'touch me', 'glide', and adjectives such as 'slippery', 'round' and 'loose'. In Djupt i rummet (Deep in the room), the text is presented as a whole in a Palestrina-like simple counterpoint section at the beginning. The poem is then broken down into phonemes used as material for a musical game that becomes increasingly like a virtuoso piece until its culmination. A simple chorale featuring the poem again over slow harmonic waves concludes the work. The songs are of course dedicated to the Swedish Radio Choir.’
© Esa-Pekka Salonen, 2000