London Orchestra da Camera: Stravinsky’s Symphony of Psalms

Crouch End Festival Chorus sings you through ambitious music of the changing 20th century, from Glass, Stravinsky and Ives.

Itaipú (1980) was one of the pieces Glass dubbed his ‘portraits of nature,’ alongside The Light and The Canyon.

The symphonic cantata also responds to a technological marvel, the massive hydro-electric dam that was then taking shape at Itaipú on the Paraná River, which forms the border between Brazil and Paraguay.

Stravinsky’s Symphony of Psalms was written in response to a commission from Serge Koussevitzky for a work marking the 50th anniversary of the Boston Symphony Orchestra in 1930. Stravinsky’s publisher requested something ‘popular’, so the composer chose to set three ‘universally admired’ psalms. His work, in which chorus and orchestra are treated as complete equals, is unsentimental but emotionally charged.

Stravinsky’s Babel (1944) is the seventh and final movement of the rarely performed, collaborative Genesis Suite. The text of Babel is taken directly from Genesis 11:1. The story of the building and destruction of the Tower of Babel is given by the narrator, while the words of God are assigned to a two-part male chorus.

The irresistibly titled, philosophically inspired The Unanswered Question was written by Charles Ives in around 1906. Strings portray ‘the silences of druids’ in a ‘cosmic landscape’. The solo trumpet intoning ‘the perennial question of existence’ continues to strike a chord in a new century.

Programme

Glass Itaipú for chorus & orchestra

– interval –

Stravinsky
Symphony of Psalms
Babel – cantata for reciter, male chorus & orchestra

Ives The Unanswered Question (Contemplation No.1)

Performers

London Orchestra da Camera
David Temple conductor
David Horovitch narrator
Crouch End Festival Chorus
Inner Voices