This fascinating album features music (and two composers) unknown to the majority of listeners, beautifully sung by the Danish National Vocal Ensemble, and equally beautifully recorded as well. Seven works are for a cappella chorus – This is the Prophecy of the Völva (1956) by Else Marie Pade (1924-2016) is restricted to women’s voices – with the concluding suite, Maria (1980), scored for electroacoustic forces involving chorus, sound files and trombone septet.
Pade was a leading pioneer of electroacoustic composition, as Dacapo’s series of recordings since the millennium reveal. The three works here offer a wide view of her expressive sensibilities (see also 2/23). The bright Choral Movements (Korsatser) were arranged by John Høybye in 2009 (rev 2024) from a 1950s song set. Intended to have electronic accompaniment (by Stephan Bomberg), they are performed here winningly without. The finale, ‘Midsummer’s Song’, is the most joyous music on the album, contrasting with the sacred-sounding This is the Prophecy of the Völva (Völva being Odin’s spirit-guide) and the severer monumentality of Maria, live performances of which have the speakers arranged in a tower, the electronic music slowly rising in space as well as pitch through the 11 short movements.
The Slovenian Uro≈ Krek (1922-2008) was not experimental, his reputation resting largely on his instrumental compositions (he was known as ‘Mr Sinfonietta’). He was a superb choral composer, with a real feeling for word-setting, apparent right from the arresting opening of Three Autumn Songs (1991) – setting English poems by the American John Gracen Brown – that provides the album title. The Latin texts of Psalm 42 (1991) and Vester Camenae (‘I am yours, Muses’, 1994) are sympathetically set but the two Slovenian-language pieces, the wistful folk song The Clock Ticks (1997) and Solitary Speculation (1987, rev 1998), on a poem by JoŽe Udovič, drew the deeper responses.
The juxtaposition of these two vital figures’ compositions works surprisingly well. Whatever one thinks of the individual pieces (I love them), one will be hard-pushed, I think, to encounter singing of greater poise than here. Author: Guy Rickards Gramophone March issue 2025