Northern Lights – Music of Scandinavia

7.30pm

Exeter College Chapel

Turl St, Oxford OX1 3DP

£18, £8 students / under 25

Oxford Pro Musica Singers

Mark Jordan (conductor)

Northern Lights - Music of Scandinavia

Oxford Pro Musica Singers invites you to enjoy a shimmering skyscape of choral music from Northern Europe.

In a programme featuring works by Norwegian, Swedish, Finnish, Latvian and Estonian composers, there is a preponderance of pieces celebrating the night sky, not least Gjeilo’s eponymous ‘Northern Lights’ which venerates the powerful, unearthly beauty of the natural phenomenon via a text from the Song of Solomon. Among other works, we also praise Mary, the ‘star of the sea’ in Grieg’s exquisite motet, extol the romance of Swedish summer nights in choral songs by Rehnqvist, Stenhammar and Rautavaara (who was actually Finnish), and replicate the music of the spheres with Gjeilo and Ešenvalds, who creates a celestial soundscape with the addition of some very unusual instruments…

Further works, however, celebrate more earthbound aspects of Northern European culture, such as a Swedish dance and the folk music of Lapland in witty settings by Mäntyjärvi, and the Icelandic naming tradition which inspired Arvo Pärt’s incantatory ‘…which was the son of…’, its inventive litany on the subject of inheritance climaxing in suitably magisterial splendour.

Performed in the glittering surrounds of Exeter College Chapel, this luminous and varied display of choral music will certainly make it a night to remember - please do join us!

n.b. The concert will finish around 9pm.

Oxford Pro Musica Singers in Exeter College Chapel

Oxford Pro Musica Singers performing in Exeter College Chapel, Oxford, 2023

Full programme :