Rising – Ešenvalds, Northern Lights
Ēriks Ešenvalds – Northern Lights
Sunrise, Monday April 13
Come above...The world is on fire!
Being reminded that the world is full of awe and wonder is a gift any day.
Especially a Monday...
...in April
...2020.
It's an equal gift to experience those emotions - awe and wonder, love and benevolence. We have the good fortune to sing such emotions; in fact, we're in the business of emotions. It's a part of our job. And, while we are committed to reflecting on the social, political, and environmental state of the world in our singing, sometimes we are invited to do that simply by focusing on the stark beauty of the natural world. At times it's enough, just to be reminded.
New week. More Spring.
More Sun. More music.
Ēriks Esenvalds is obsessed with one of those natural-world phenomena: the aurora borealis. He has written a number of works about those strange, breath-taking waves, and his Northern Lights is a gem among them. Ēriks is all things spiritual, colorful, Latvian. In Northern Lights, that combination is symphonic in scope. Its seed is in the Latvian folklore of his childhood that describes the lights as "the restless spirits of fallen warriors, still fighting their battles in the sky." Its expansion is in the artful diaries of two 19th-century Arctic explorers, Hall and Nansen.
What do we love most about singing this work? A first glance at this score would lead us to think it would be the two wild climaxes, the vocal lines mimicking the swirling designs of the northern lights, described by the explorers:
A dazzling light, overpow'ring light burst upon my startled senses!
Or, maybe we thought we'd most love singing into the eerie, shimmering atmosphere of tone bells and tuned water glasses:
The strings trembled and sparkled in the glow of the flames
Both gestures are certainly unique and powerful: Classic Ēriks.
But, we most love to sing this work for another, more subtle reason. From the final, richly poetic line of Hall and Nansen's record, Ēriks focuses on one phrase...
Again at times it was like softly playing, gently rocking silvery waves,
On which dreams travel into unknown worlds.
...and he accomplishes that marvel composers seem to do on instinct: he stops us and lets us reflect on ourselves for an instant by repeating the musical gesture of "dreams travel" several times. The strangely airborne music settles: it returns to Earth, and to the Latvian myth of the origin. It feels as if he sets his excitement - his music - on a shelf and, in stillness, takes a last look at our imagination, at history, and at memory.
In doing so, the simple record of a trip to the North takes on universal meaning.
Music.
- The Whole Team @ The Crossing
Northern Lights
music by Ēriks Ešenvalds
words of a Latvian folksong and the observations of the two 19th-century Arctic explorers, Charles Francis Hall and Fridtjof Nansen
recorded live in concert April 12, 2015 at Longwood Gardens
audio by Paul Vazquez of Digital Mission Audio Services
art by Steven Bradshaw (also the tenor soloist!)
* * *
Cik naksnīnas pret ziemeli
Redzēj' kāvus karojam;
Karo kāvi pie debesu,
Vedīs karus mus' zemē.
–Latvian folksong
(How many nights against the North Wind
I saw the Northern Lights fighting;
Fighting in the sky, the Northern Lights
Bring wars to our land.)
It was night, and I had gone on deck several times.
Iceberg was silent; I too was silent.
It was true dark and cold.
At nine o’clock I was below in my cabin,
When the captain hailed me with the words:
“Come above, Hall, at once! The world is on fire!"
I knew his meaning, and, quick as thought,
I rushed to the companion stairs.
In a moment I reached the deck,
And as the cabin door swung open,
A dazzling light, overpow’ring light
burst upon my startled senses!
Oh, the whole sky was one glowing mass of colored flames,
so mighty, so brave!
Like a pathway of light the northern lights
seemed to draw us into the sky.
Yes, it was harp-music, wild storming in the darkness;
The strings trembled and sparkled in the glow of the flames
Like a shower of fiery darts.
A fiery crown of auroral light cast a warm glow
across the arctic ice.
Again at times it was like softly playing,
gently rocking silvery waves,
On which dreams travel into unknown worlds.
–Charles Francis Hall and Fridtjof Nansen