Music by Jonathan Harvey and Nicholas Maw featured at the 2023 Nordic Choir Expedition on 3 June in Helsinki, which brings together leading professional chamber choirs across Scandinavia. In an early evening concert Graham Ross conducted Ars Nova Copenhagen in Maw’s One Foot in Eden Still, I Stand before Nils Schweckendiek and the Helsinki Chamber Choir performed Harvey’s Marahi (1999).
One Foot in Eden Still, I Stand is Maw’s setting of Edwin Muir for mixed choir and soloists or semichorus, with optional organ accompaniment. It was commissioned to celebrate the 550th anniversary of the founding of King’s College Cambridge in 1990 and was premiered by Stephen Cleobury and the Choir of King’s College, Cambridge. The choir recorded the 6-minute work with Cleobury in 1993.
The topic of Muir’s poetry is the Fall, whose theology is overlaid with his own personal sense of loss of innocence in moving from the remote Orkney idyll of his childhood to urban Glasgow. The motet’s opening suggests this tranquillity, before the music grows increasingly agitated, with a notably jagged alto solo for the passage ‘Scattered along the winter way’. Eventually, though, both poem and music find concord and resolution. The anthem has been performed at the Berlin Philharmonie by the RIAS Kammerchor and the Queen Elizabeth Hall by Stephen Layton and the Holst Singers.
Marahi was premiered in 1999 by SWR Vokalensemble Stuttgart. The 9-minute work for unaccompanied mixed voices is a polyglot setting of traditional Latin Marian antiphons, Buddhist prayers in both English and Sanskrit to the goddess Varahi, and an English adaptation of the Renaissance Hymn to the Virgin. In this respect it reflects the confluence of multiple cultural currents and musical traditions that characterises Harvey’s work.
Marahi has been performed at the Aldeburgh, Norwich & Norfolk, and Three Choirs festivals by the Joyful Company of Singers; it also appeared as part of the 2012 Harvey ‘Total Immersion’ day at the Barbican, performed by the BBC Singers. Marahi has been recorded by Les Jeunes Solistes – on their Angels disc of Harvey’s choral music from 2007, conducted by Rachid Safir – and the Latvian Radio Choir with James Wood, released through Hyperion in 2011.
Nils Schweckendiek has previously conducted Marahi, Ashes Dance Back, and sweet/winterhart – a Paul Celan translation of Shakespeare set for violin and choir – at Musica Nova Helsinki, as part of the 2005 focus on the composer.