On 31 May the Dresdner Kreuzchor premiered Torsten Rasch’s Crux Duplex at the Kreuzkirche, conducted by their Intendant and Kreuzkantor Martin Lehman. The 7-minute work was commissioned for a special Vespers programme gathering choristers past and present.
The performance saw 150 voices come together, comprising alumni and current members of the celebrated choir. This mixture was reflected in the musical material, where the lower male voices of the alumni dialogue with the mixed voices of the current choir. The main text is the motto of the choir, sung alongside familiar tunes in German, adapted by Rasch, until the massed forces bring the work to a thunderous fortissimo end.
Growing up in Dresden, Rasch was a member of the choir from 1974-82. It was during a choir tour to West Germany that he acquired an illicit copy of Reiner Kunze’s Die wunderbaren Jahre, a dissident commentary on life in the former GDR, which would be the basis of his latest stage work, currently in rep at the Theater Regensburg. The music theatre work for 3 singers, narrator, and chamber ensemble was celebrated by critics following its premiere in February 2025.
Crux Duplex joins several choral works in Rasch’s catalogue, crowned by the 2014 cantata A Foreign Field, an ambitious 40-minute work commissioned by the Three Choirs Festival that sets poetry from both sides of First World War and Biblical psalm texts, and the Latin Requiem Mass, that follows the structure of the Latin Evensong. It premiered with Yeree Suh (soprano), Roderick Williams (baritone), the choristers of Worcester, Hereford, Gloucester and Chemnitz Cathedrals, the Three Choirs Festival Chorus and the Philharmonia Orchestra conducted by Baldur Brönnimann. 2014 also saw the premiere for Rasch’s intense, fragmentary Hölderlin cycle for mixed choir …in der Hülse von Schnee… from the RIAS Kammerchor.