T. Futrell: Rest - Requiem for strings and voices

Thursday March 14, 19:00
Oslo Cathedral

Ensemble Allegria
The Norwegian Soloists' Choir
Grete Pedersen, conductor

The Church Music Festival has rarely experienced so much positive, overwhelming, and genuine feedback as after the world premiere of Tyler Futrell’s Stabat Mater in 2022. Futrell has a unique ability to combine aestheticism and realism, to create something that is intellectually stimulating, but that first and foremost speaks to people’s hearts. We therefore wanted to commission a new requiem by Futrell, which will be performed for the first time by Ensemble Allegria and the Soloists’ Choir under the direction of Grete Pedersen. Futrell wanted to use the traditional requiem texts, as well as a series of more modern texts, especially poems Rolf Jacobsen wrote after losing his wife. The texts are about death, our relationship to it, and what it represents in our lives. Futrell says about his Requiem:

‘I wanted to write a requiem from a humanist perspective, a requiem that speaks to those of us left, that reflects the unresolved feelings of loss many of us are carrying and trying to process. We mourn, we miss, sometimes we are even angry for being abandoned, or angry at ourselves for what we didn’t do when we had the chance. I use parts of the traditional Latin text and the thematic structure, but at the same time bend them to reflect a mourning process, and mix in various other texts in different languages from different time periods, to reflect the constantly moving cloud of ideas around death we have to deal with. I use these texts to place the audience in a more immediate contact with their own experiences, something that thousand-year-old Latin texts about eternal light might not be able to do – even though it is one of the images that the piece has to acknowledge. Rest is an English translation of requiem, which is what a requiem traditionally asks for on behalf of the dead, but which is also something the mourners need themselves. The title can also refer to what is left: memories, remains.’

The Soloists’ Choir and Ensemble Allegria also perform Spem in alium and If ye love me by Thomas Tallis, Vaughan Williams’ Tallis Variations, and Misericordia Domini KV 222 by W.A. Mozart.