ECM New Series Releases Vox Clamantis’s New Recording of Music by Henrik Ødegaard out on June 2
ECM New Series Releases
Vox Clamantis’s Recording of Music by Henrik Ødegaard
Jaan-Eik Tulve, conductor
ECM New Series 2767
0289 4858473 4
Release Date: June 2, 2023
After dedicating past ECM New Series recordings to the works of contemporary composers Arvo Pärt, Erkki-Sven Tüür, Helena Tulve and most recently Cyrillus Kreek, the Vox Clamantis choir, under the direction of Jaan-Eik Tulve, turns its attention towards Norwegian composer Henrik Ødegaard with a fine-drawn programme of liturgical choral music. Vox Clamantis are at home in the worlds of both old and new music, having addressed Gregorian chant and the polyphony of Pérotin as well as present-day compositions on previous albums. The ensemble and the works of Ødegaard make a perfect match, as the composer’s work, in a subtle sleight of hand, interweaves Gregorian chant with Norwegian folk song.
“In this recording, Gregorian chant is the protagonist,” writes Kristina Kõrver in the liner notes, “sometimes in its pure beauty, sometimes intertwined with the ‘new song’ of Henrik Ødegaard. As an organist and choir conductor, his musical thinking has been strongly influenced by two important traditions, Gregorian chant and Norwegian folk music, both of which have found unique expressions in his work.”
While these two traditions appear inextricably merged into one in the performance of the choir, they are visibly separated from one another in Ødegaard’s scores – the passages of Gregorian chant being marked in square notation, the predominant musical notation form in European vocal music from the 13th to the early 17th century. It’s a symbolic divide, translated gracefully into the music by opening up monophonic plainchant with modern polyphonic ingredients. The composer employs liturgical hymns as source material, from which he then branches off with his own compositional voice.
His empathic embrace of the original scores is as respectful as it is subtle, endowing the early music with different shades of his own creation and thereby achieving a fresh perspective. The approach his heard on Jesu, dulces memoria, composed in 2014/2015, with the title of the original Gregorian hymn maintained. He gently integrates new musical material on O filii et filiae, based on a 15th century paschal hymn, and the approach persists in the following Kyrie and the conductus Pater noster.
The main work here is the eight-part Meditations over St. Mary Magdalene’s Feast in Nidaros, originally conceived to be sung by two separate choirs. It is based on antiphons found in a 13th-century manuscript from medieval Scandinavia. Ødegaard’s compositional process transfigures these antiphons without overriding the original sketches – a process described in the liner notes “as if the composer were literally sitting in front of a fragmentary manuscript, filling in the gaps and adding the missing lines, not as scholar-restorer, but as a poet, a co-creator.”
The album was recorded at the St. Nicholas Dome in Haapsalu, Estonia, in March 2021.
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With an extensive background of studies in trombone, church music, composition and Gregorian chant, Henrik Ødegaard (Oslo, 1955) settled his focus on liturgical composition, working as choir conductor, organist and composer. He is represented in the Norwegian hymn book (1985), and from 1982 to 2006 held a position as organist/choir conductor in Sauherad, Telemark, in addition to being an active composer. His main focus is on choir music, where he mixes plainchant with the Norwegian folk tradition, employing micro-tonal elements in the process. Ødegaard has received commissions from Oslo Chamber Choir, Oslo Philharmonic, Telemark Brass Ensemble, Telemark Chamber Choir, and many other ensembles across Scandinavia and the Baltic States.
Tulve and Ødegaard first met 30 years ago, when Tulve was giving Gregorian chant masterclasses in Norway. Shortly after, the composer would go on to study at the Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musqiue et de Danse de Paris, where Tulve was the assistant of the professor of Gregorian chant, Louis-Marie Vigne. Tulve: “Henrik has always been interested in linking Gregorian chant to his own compositions, and so we have a long-standing connection through his work. Vox Clamantis has been performing his music for years. It is therefore deeply symbolic that he wrote Meditations over St. Mary Magdalene’s Feast in Nidaros, in which he used the old manuscripts of the Trondheim Cathedral, specifically for us and the Norwegian women's ensemble Schola Sanctæ Sunnivæ.”
After leading the Paris Gregorian Choir and the Lac et Mel ensemble, Jaan-Eik Tulve founded Vox Clamantis in Tallinn in 1996, and he remains its artistic director and conductor today. From the outset a collective with members sharing interest in Gregorian chant, Vox Clamantis has explored both early polyphony and contemporary music, with many composers writing new music for the group. Vox Clamantis’s recordings have won numerous awards, and in 2017 the ensemble received the National Cultural Award of the Republic of Estonia. The choir appears on numerous critically acclaimed ECM New Series recordings, including Erkki-Sven Tüür’s Oxymoron (2007), Filia Sion (2012), Arvo Pärt’s Adam’s Lament (2012) and The Deer’s Cry (2016), Helena Tulve’s Arboles lloran por lluvia (2014), and The Suspended Harp of Babel (2020) with music by Estonian composer Cyrillus Kreek. The BBC and The Observer, among much other international press, had high praise for the latter, each connecting something deeply universal but also alien with the music, calling it “magic of another sphere” on the one hand and “music of another place and time, beautifully done” on the other.
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