Purgatorium

As the title would suggest, Purgatorium is a work about purification – a journey through strange inner landscapes, never knowing which road you’ll end up on. The parts culminate into each other in the least expected ways, transformations materialize, and we are thrown into mysterious and unfamiliar sounds and circumstances.

While working on this I sensed the need for an a cappella motet in the middle of the piece. This meant I needed a lyric, and so I wrote a letter to the Swedish poet, librettist, and writer Peter Bäckström. After a bit of letter correspondence between Nesodden, where I lived, and Malmö, where he lived, a sonnet turned up in the mail, and it was as if the music was already finished. We’d written it together, without any sense of trying to control it.

The rest of the work is without text, with the exception of two short excerpts from Dante’s Purgatorium in the second part – the Latin hymn Te lucis ante terminum and Dante’s poem Amor che ne la mente mi ragiona.

Four Pieces From A Distance were composed in the spring of 2020 during the first part of the COVID-19 pandemic under the strict regulations of social distancing. In several sections of the piece, the musicians are asked to play completely without coordination with the other performers. Two of the songs are based on traditional hymns, ‘O the Deep, Deep Love of Jesus’ and ‘Children of the Heavenly Father’. The latter has been given the subtitle ‘Andrà tutto bene’, the Italian expression that children all over the world wrote on their rainbow drawings, with a desire and hope that in the end everything would turn out alright.

Oslo Kammerkor (Oslo Chamber Choir)
NyNorsk Brass Quintet
Hakon Daniel Nystedt, Conductor