Artists

Ensemble Allegria
The Norwegian Soloists’ Choir
Grete Pedersen, conductor

New Requiem by Tyler Futrell performed by Allegria and The Norwegian Soloists’ Choir

The church music festival has rarely experienced so much positive, overwhelming and heartfelt feedback as after the premiere of Tyler Futrell's Stabat mater in 2022. Futrell's ability to combine aesthetics and realism, to create something that is intellectually exciting, but above all speaks directly to people's hearts , is unique. We therefore wanted to commission a requiem by Futrell, to be premiered by Ensemble Allegria and the Solist Choir, under the direction of Grete Pedersen. Futrell wanted to use the traditional requiem texts, as well as a number of more modern texts, especially poems by Rolf Jacobsen that were written after he lost his wife. The lyrics deal with death, our relationship with it and what it represents in our lives. Futrell says of his own Requiem:

"I wanted to write a requiem from a humanist perspective, a requiem that speaks to those of us who are left, that reflects the unresolved feelings of loss that many of us carry and try to process. We grieve, we miss, sometimes we're even angry that we've been abandoned, or angry at ourselves for what we didn't do when we still had the opportunity. I use parts of the traditional Latin text and the thematic structure, but at the same time shape it to reflect a grieving process, and mix in various other texts in different languages ​​from different times, to reflect the swirling cloud of ideas around death that we have to deal with. I use these texts to put the audience in more immediate contact with their experiences, something that perhaps thousand-year-old Latin texts about eternal light fail to do - even though that is one of the images that the play has to deal with. Rest is an English translation of requiem (rest), which is what a requiem traditionally asks for on behalf of those who have died, but which is also something the mourners themselves need. In addition, the title can refer to what remains: memories, remains.”

At the concert, the Soloist Choir and Ensemble Allegria will also perform Spem in alium and If ye love me by Thomas Tallis, Tallis Variations by Vaughan Williams and Misericordia Domini, KV 222 by W.A. Mozart.