Rolf MARTINSSON (b. 1956)
St. Luke Passion (2012)
Lisa Larsson (soprano) – Evangelist
Peter Boman (baritone) – Jesus
Mark Levengood (narrator)
Växjö Cathedral Oratorio Choir, instrumentalists / Sten-Inge Petersson
Rec live at Växjö Cathedral 12-14 April 2019
DAPHNE 1066 [42:56 + 45:28]
Rolf Martinsson is one of Sweden’s leading composers internationally. He has collaborated with many of the foremost Swedish instrumentalists and singers, in particular with soprano Lisa Larsson for whom he has composed some ten works. His music has been played in New York, Vienna, Berlin, Leipzig, Salzburg, Hamburg and London and he was Composer-in-Residence at the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam with the Netherlands Philharmonic Orchestra and the Netherlands Philharmonic Chamber Orchestra. In Sweden he has had the same function with the Malmö Symphony Orchestra, the Helsingborg Symphony Orchestra and Musica Vitae. He is professor of composition at the Malmö Academy of Music and a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Music.
In 2011 he received a commission from 12 Swedish choirs to write a sacred choral work. The instructions were very clear: the degree of difficulty had to be accessible for the amateur singers who constitute the widespread Swedish choral life; more than one million singers regularly take part in this national movement; many of them sing in more than one choir. Likewise the instrumental accompaniments had to be accessible for amateur musicians to make it possible to perform the work with local forces. On the other hand the solo parts demand professional artists.
The St. Luke Passion was premiered by the 12 co-commissioning choirs in the spring of 2012 and everywhere it was enthusiastically received by the audiences. Since then the composition has been performed more than 70 times in Sweden and has been established as a standard work, and the publishers are planning a German version for international distribution in 2021.
Structurally Martinsson chose the Baroque passions as a model with the texts from the Bible recited or sung as recitative and with choruses (including a choral speech), arias and a duet commenting on the tidings in Göran Greider’s sensitive texts. Greider is, besides a deep interest in music, a leading poet who has published about ten poetry collections and a number of prose works. He is also, since many years, editor-in-chief at the newspaper Dala-Demokraten. The tonal language is primarily very accessible as well and clearly inspired by Bach with preludes and entr’actes. The first entr’acte (CD 1 tr. 4) is a beautiful pastoral idyll for flute and oboe. The woodwind have a lot to do throughout but Martinsson employs the small ensemble - only six instruments – very cleverly for maximal variety. In the choruses and arias he works in a moderately modern idiom, but still it should be fully accessible for general listeners who feel alienated from the most extreme modernism.
The recording was made live during three consecutive days in the attractive acoustics of the spacious Växjö Cathedral – an impressive building with the characteristic twin towers, a photo of which adorns the booklet. About 830 visitors can be seated in the cathedral, the history of which goes back to the Middle Ages. The interior, however, bears the stamp of far-reaching renovations during the 19th and 20th centuries. The Oratorio Choir, founded in 1974 , has since the start concentrated on large-scale works like Bach’s Passions and B minor Mass, Handel’s Messiah and Brahms’s Requiem. It is a fine body with homogenous sonority and powerful fortes. The group of instrumentalists is likewise excellent and the balance between voices and instruments is skilfully handled. The narrator, Mark Levengood, is a well-known personality in Swedish TV and Radio and his Finno-Swedish accent is a pleasure to listen to. Unfortunately the solo singers are less of an asset. Soprano Lisa Larsson, who was one of the loveliest Zerlinas I’ve ever heard more than twenty years ago, has lost much of her beautiful tone and adopted both a disturbing vibrato and a regrettable shrillness. Fortunately she has retained her expressivity and good handling of the text. This also goes for Peter Boman, whose sturdy baritone serves him well in the recitatives, but he too lacks the tonal beauty one longs for in the lyrical moments.
Still the recording is a valuable addition to the none too rich discography of Swedish sacred music, and hopefully it will trigger other sizable church choirs to tackle the work. The spate of performances during the last few years seems to indicate that St. Luke Passion has come to stay.
The booklet notes are in English only but the sung Swedish texts are printed with translations in both German and English.
Göran Forsling
