The Moscow-based vocal ensemble Intrada is known for its masterful interpretations of a wide repertoire ranging from European and Russian Baroque music to world premieres of works from the 20th and the 21st centuries. At the Diaghilev Festival, Intrada will perform the writings choral cycle by American postminimalist composer David Lang.
Being one of the most sought-after contemporary composers in the world, David Lang easily balances academic, pop, and rock music. His desire to make academic music accessible to a wide variety of audiences led him, along with like-minded composers, to create a Bang on a Can community that takes classical music beyond traditional concert venues. Lang is the author of music for films by Darren Aronofsky, Paolo Sorrentino, and Paul Dano, an Oscar nominee, a Grammy Award winner and a Pulitzer Prize winner for the oratorio The Little Match Girl Passion.
David Lang has been creating the writings for 15 years. First, in 2005, he became interested in The Book of Ecclesiastes — the composer poetically reworked the Old Testament lines about the eternal cyclicity of the world and the vanity of human life and wrote a 6-minute meditative choral composition. On the advice of his rabbi, Lang turned to other texts of The Tanakh (Hebrew Bible) from The Writings division, which play an important role during Jewish religious holidays. In 2008, the chorus for love is strong (
https://davidlangmusic.com/music/for-love-is-strong),which interprets the motifs from The Song of Songs, became part of the oratorio The Little Match Girl Passion. In 2015 the composer wrote a chorus based on a fragment from The Book of Ruth, and a year later he compiled a choral catalogue of all types of retribution for human sins from The Lamentation of Jeremiah. Finally, in 2019 he turned to The Book of Esther — a new composition if I am silent (
https://davidlangmusic.com/music/if-i-am-silent) became the second part of a full-length cycle, which premiered in the same year.
A refrain of the first part completes the choral fresco of the writings. The author explains his concept as follows, ‘Much of religion is mysterious and unknowable, but these books are all about people and their emotional lives – life and death, courage, love, companionship, regret. One way to think of these five writings together is as a catalogue of human emotions, repeating endlessly, year after year. The cycle begins and ends with the movement again (after ecclesiastes). The score instructs the performers to sing it differently, the second time it is sung. The cycle, like the year, may repeat, but never exactly.’
The Russian premiere of David Lang's cycle performed by the Intrada chamber choir takes place in collaboration with the SOUND UP festival. The SOUND UP Festival of extraordinary musical events is a series of concerts created for people interested in new sounds and ideas. It has become one of the most notable Moscow musical phenomena in the past ten years. SOUND UP positions itself as a kind of guide in the world of modern music, representing modern composers and musicians working in such fields as modern classical, instrumental and experimental music, and electronics. The project curators find unexpected performance spaces and prepare a unique set design for each of them. Special events of the festival include events prepared by SOUND UP curators and guest musicians, festival ideologists, music experts, as well as collaborative concerts by Russian and foreign musicians and multimedia artists.
