Penderecki: Sacred Choral Works Latvian Radio Choir & Sigvards Klava

• Krzysztof Penderecki (1933 - 2020): O gloriosa virginum:
• 1Penderecki: O gloriosa virginum (2009)03:38
• De profundis:
• 2Penderecki: De profundis (1996)06:09
• In pulverem mortis:
• 3Penderecki: In pulverem mortis (1966)05:52
• Song of Cherubim:
• 4Penderecki: Song of Cherubim (1986)06:43
• Veni Creator:
• 5Penderecki: Veni Creator (1987)07:31
• Miserere:
• 6Penderecki: Miserere (1965)04:35
• Agnus Die:
• 7Penderecki: Agnus Dei (1981)07:32
• Missa brevis:
• 8Penderecki: Missa brevis (2012): I. Kyrie02:03
• 9Penderecki: Missa brevis (2012): II. Gloria03:13
• 10Penderecki: Missa brevis (2012): III. Benedicamus Domino03:16
• 11Penderecki: Missa brevis (2012): IV. Sanctus01:48
• 12Penderecki: Missa brevis (2012): V. Benedictus02:17
• 13Penderecki: Missa brevis (2012): VI. Agnus Dei04:55
• Total Runtime59:32

Info for Penderecki: Sacred Choral Works

This year marks the 90th birthday of Krzysztof Penderecki (1933–2020), one of the most prominent 21st Century Polish composers. Sacred themes and texts surround the creative work of Penderecki, including many of his large-scale works. This album by the award-winning Latvian Radio Choir under Sigvards Klava consists the majority of his impressive sacred a cappella choral works from five different decades and which are mainly written in Latin. These deeply religious choral works are modern classics in choral repertoire. Recent album by the choir, featuring choral works by John Cage, received nomination for the Gramophone Awards 2023.

The defining characteristics of Penderecki’s compositional language are many, and his style evolved throughout his career. He experimented with graphic notation and various extended techniques, his use of dense chord clusters was one of the hallmarks of his pre-1970s period, and he was fascinated by the idea of liberating the sound from traditional means of production. These characteristics can be heard also in his choral works written in the 1960s. By the mid-1970s his style began to gravitate towards leaner sounds and textures, and traditional tonality. Having had the experience of two extremes – artistic limitations imposed by the totalitarian ideology of communist Poland, and the almost unlimited freedom of Western avant-garde, which resulted in a continuous destruction of form, he started to search for new artistic means of expression. Although Penderecki’s compositional approaches changed and evolved during his many decades of creative work, what remained constant is his ardent response to dramatic and tragic events in human history. Penderecki’s ability to communicate emotional responses to historical events, past or present, is perhaps best demonstrated in his choral music, where the human voice is the instrument connecting the mind to the heart. The most extensive work on this album is Penderecki’s Missa brevis (2012), which is also among his final works.

Latvian Radio Choir
Sigvards Klava, conductor

Sigvards Kļava
began working with the Latvian Radio Choir in 1987 and was appointed its Chief Conductor and Artistic Director in 1992. As one of Latvia's most prolific choral conductors, Sigvards Kļava has collaborated with every leading choir and orchestra in the country, performing the great works of the standard repertoire in addition to conducting most premieres of new choral works by Latvian composers. He has recorded over 20 CDs with the Latvian Radio Choir. Sigvards Kļava has also been Chief Conductor at a number of Latvian and Nordic song festivals. He is a co-founder of the Latvian New Music Festival ARENA and serves as a member of its artistic board. He teaches young conductors at the Choral Department of the Latvian Academy of Music and the Choral College of the Riga Lutheran Cathedral. Sigvards Kļava appears as a guest conductor with leading European choirs. He has received the Latvian Great Music Award and the Latvian Cabinet of Ministers Award.

Einojuhani Rautavaara
(born 9 October 1928) is internationally one of the best known and most frequently performed Finnish composers. He is by nature a romantic, even a mystic, as is often apparent from the titles of his works: for example Angels and Visitations for orchestra or his double-bass concerto Angel of Dusk. Despite Rautavaara's label of "mysticism" he is a complex and contradictory figure whose works cannot be categorized in stylistic terms.

At the age of seventeen Rautavaara began studying the piano and later went on to study musicology at Helsinki University and composition at the Sibelius Academy. From 1951-53 he was a pupil of Aarre Merikanto receiving his diploma in composition in 1957. In 1955 the Koussewitzky Foundation awarded Jean Sibelius a scholarship in honour of his 90th birthday to enable a young Finnish composer of his choice to study in the United States. Sibelius selected Rautavaara who spent two years studying with Vincent Persichetti at the Juilliard School of Music in New York and also took part in the summer courses at Tanglewood given by Roger Sessions and Aaron Copland. In 1957 Rautavaara continued his studies with Wladimir Vogel in Ascona, Switzerland and a year later with Rudolf Petzold in Cologne. Rautavaara has taught and lectured at the Sibelius Academy as the professor of composition. Since 1988 he has made his living as a composer in Helsinki.

Rautavaara's earliest works revealed close ties to tradition but also his desire to renew it. They were followed by an extreme constructivist and avant-garde phase (as in the serially organized fourth symphony "Arabescata", 1962) after which Rautavaara turned to hyper-romanticism and finally mysticism. Since the early 1980s, Rautavaara has adopted a sort of post-modern musical language in which modern and traditional elements of varying degrees of constructivism or freedom are combined with one another.

Rautavaara has composed eight symphonies, the most frequently performed of them being the Angel of Light, his seventh symphony. Symphony No. 8, The Journey was premiered in April 2000 by The Philadelphia Orchestra under Wolfgang Sawallisch. Other important groups of works include concertos for different solo instruments, among them the three piano concertos, the popular Violin Concerto (1977), the Harp Concerto (2000) and the Clarinet Concerto (2001-02). Rautavaara has also written a large body of chamber music as well as choral and vocal works including All-Night Vigil for a cappella chorus. One of Rautavaara's most popular works is Cantus arcticus, concerto for birds and orchestra, in which the straightforward orchestral part is juxtaposed with the sounds of birds recorded by the composer himself. Rautavaara's latest orchestral works, published by Boosey & Hawkes, include and Manhattan Trilogy (2004), Book of Visions (2005), Before the Icons (2005) and A Tapestry of Life (2007).

Apart form his symphonies (ODE 1145-2Q) and concertos (ODE 1156-2Q), the central pillars of Rautavaara's extensive oeuvre are his operas. With Vincent (1985-87) and The House of the Sun (1990) Rautavaara has scored a notable international success. Aleksis Kivi (1995-96) was premiered at the Savonlinna Opera Festival in 1997 and it has been performed in Cosenza, Italy and Minneapolis, U.S.A since then. The latest stage work is Rasputin (2001-2003), an opera about the life of mystic and healer Grigory Rasputin.

Booklet for Penderecki: Sacred Choral Works