Staffan Storm: Choral Works

Description

This album presents for first time a larger selection of Staffan Storm's choral music. It is also the result of a long-standing collaboration with Erik Westberg and his Vocal Ensemble, who have regularly performed and commissioned new music by Storm in recent years. The suite "Aspects of Snow" is based on old Japanese poems and has in a short time established itself as a choral classic with many performances around Sweden and internationally. "Seelenherbst" ("Autumn of the Soul") for mixed choir and percussion is based on a selection of poems by Luise Buchner (the sister of the author of "Wozzeck", Georg Buchner). The poems form a cycle of five movements, where the two outer movements depict a journey from winter to autumn, while the three middle movements are evening and night moods of different characters. "Nachtregen" for solo viola and chorus sets two poems by Else Lasker-Schuler to music. She was one of the leading German writers in the decades after the turn of the century 1900 and became famous for her expressionist poetry and her colorful performances. "Langt i forsvunna tider" ("Far in Bygone Times") takes its starting point from three songs by Wilhelm Stenhammar, "Stjarnoga", "Flickan knyter i Johannesnatten" and "Vore jag ett litet barn". Swedish Radio commissioned the work for the 150th anniversary of Stenhammar in 2021 and Swedish Radio Choir premiered it under the direction of Erik Westberg.