All Saints' Eve is the time to remember the dead, but also perhaps to reflect on what death is?
In sacred music the Catholic funeral mass or Requiem text is most often brought forward during All Saints' commemorations, and there are many well-known Requiem compositions. Mozart's Requiem perhaps looms largest as the most well-known.
This All Saints' Eve Bergen Domkor invites to a performance of a completely newly written requiem, composed by Torbjørn Dyrud. His work also takes its starting point in the classical Requiem text. But this requiem also opens up for something more, perhaps best illustrated in this Bible verse from Corinthians: «For now we see only a reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.»
Dyrud has found inspiration in people's accounts of near-death experiences, and uses these in the composition. In this way this requiem becomes not only a memorial for the dead, but also an exploration of what death can be and represent. This mystery is one we humans have tried to come closer to since the dawn of time. Can Dyrud's requiem lift the veil a little and let us come closer to the mystery?
Together with Dyrud's requiem Charles Parry's Six Songs of Farewell (1916-18) is performed. These songs the composer wrote in the latter part of his life, at a time when he lost several of his music students to The Great War, or the First World War as this war is called in Norway. The composition expresses the despair Parry felt, and the expression affected the British: Parry's songs have become a natural part of many British funerals. The first time they were performed in their entirety was at a memorial for Parry himself in 1919, and later they also became part of Queen Elizabeth II's funeral in 2022.
Bergen Domkor
Brass trio
String trio
Kjetil Almenning, conductor
