ARNANNGUAQ POSBORG GERSTRØM
Textures of Snow and Ice
GALINA GRIGORJEVA
Lamento (for solo recorder)
PELLE GUDMUNDSEN-HOLMGREEN
Song
SUNLEIF RASMUSSEN
Songs of Solitude and Night
Music from Greenland, the Faroe Islands, Denmark and Estonia
As part of Theater of Voices' collaboration with Holbæk Municipality, we are making a trip to Sønder Asmindrup Church. The church opened in 1150, as it says on Google (!), and has both rich frescoes, rune carvings, and beautifully preserved wood carvings. With a donation of almost £1 million from A.P. Møller Fonden, the church has recently been completely restored and upgraded to a new and climate-friendly building with a completely modern interior.
This year, Theater of Voices focuses on climate in our concert programs, and in January we set out to celebrate our 30th birthday at Kings Place in London as the house ensemble for 2020 and their ‘Nature Unwrapped’ series. This was to be concluded with a major premiere of John Luther Adams by December. The first concert focused on biodynamic cultivation, including the screening of Phie Ambo's beautiful documentary ‘Good Things Await’. The final concert being about a cross-section of the entire geological development of the earth and the (very small) share of mankind holds in this. The premiere has been postponed to next year due to Covid-19.
This September, Theater of Voices and Michala Petri should have been in Nuuk to perform in the Katuaq culture house as a conclusion to our North Atlantic Tour from last year (Odsherred Chamber Music Festival, Tjørnuvík, Tórshavn, Reykjavik). After three sets of changed flights, hotel bookings and new quarantine rules for stopovers in Iceland, we had to give up. Therefore, it will now only be the audience in Sønder Asmindrup Church that will hear this program in 2020. It contains new Nordic/Baltic music, and we are especially proud to present the two works written in 2019 by Arnnanguaq Gerstrøm from Greenland and Sunleif Rasmussen from the Faroe Islands.
The first work is Gerstrøm's artistic interpretation of a number of scientific terms for snow and ice - and the increasing melting of the Greenlandic ice sheet. Rasmussen's work takes us back to the time of the sagas in text by William Heinesen and excerpts from the Old Edda - from the time Sønder Asmindrup Church was built, and someone engraved the runes 'Toke borrowed silver from Ragnhild' in the choir's north wall.
All rules on distance are observed.
Due to the space conditions, a maximum of 46 people will be present.
Theater of Voices is supported by Statens Kunstfond, Holbæk Municipality, Augustinus Foundation.
The project is supported by:
Nordisk Kulturfond
Statens Kunstfond
Augustinus Fonden
A.P. Møller Fonden
Dansk Komponistforening
Solistforeningen af 1921
Dansk Kapelmesterforening
Gramex Funds
Michala Petri - recorder
Mathias Friis-Hansen - percussion
Theatre of Voices
-Else Torp
-Signe Asmussen
-Paul Bentley-Angell
-Jakob Bloch Jespersen
Paul Hillier - artistic director