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About this recording...

By Lars Hannibal

For Michala Petri, music is a journey, an adventure, both a pilgrimage to time-honoured traditions and an odyssey to discover new forms of expression. This album was the result of one such journey, gradually evolving over several years from a confluence of serendipitous meetings, enthusiastic colleagues and the desire to try something different.

The idea of combining the recorder with a choir is certainly nothing new; the recorder has joined the human voice in song for almost as long as the instrument has existed. The recorder is close to the human voice, producing a pure sound without mechanisms, reeds or elaborate mouthpieces to alter the tone. However, until recently, few contemporary composers have explored the expressive potential that this combination can deliver. One musician who did see the possibilities of this coupling was the Swedish composer Daniel Börtz.

When Michala came back from the premiere of Börtz‘s “Nemesis divina” in Stockholm, she was very excited about the sound of the recorder and choir together, and while not the first time she collaborated with a choir, performing this contemporary composition was an exciting experience. A year later in 2008 while at Midem in Cannes, my friend Joshua Cheek from USA introduced me to the Latvian composer Ugis Praulins. After hearing some of his choral music, the idea of doing a project exclusively of contemporary works for recorder and choir gradually took form. Ugis loved the idea of working with Hans Christian Andersen’s masterpiece “The Nightingale”, and when he told conductor Stephen Layton about our plans, Stephen suggested that we should make it together with the newly established Danish National Vocal Ensemble. As we approached the Vocal Ensemble with our proposal, the director Ivar Munk shared with us that he had also wanted to work with Michala for a long time, and gave his full support to making this possible.

No sooner had these preliminary arrangements been made, two recent recipients of the distinguished Nordic Council of Music award - the Faroese Sunleif Rasmussen and the young Dane Peter Bruun - expressed interest in writing works for us. I am extremely proud of the results – a joyous journey that both honours tradition and creates a new tradition, universal in its appeal but distinctively Nordic in its philosophic and aesthetic outlook. We invite you to join us on our continuing journey and discover for yourself the possibilities of this new Nordic music for choir and recorder.

SACD

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