VOeX Festival:
The little
match girl
passion
David Lang's beautiful and intense heralded choral composition, performed by the Children's Choir
In 2008, the American composer David Lang won the Pulitzer Prize for Music for The Little Match Girl Passion. Experience our talented Children's Choir's strong interpretation of this oratorio during the festival VOeX 2019!
The story about the poor young girl, shivering and barefoot, tries to sell matches in the street on New Years Eve is characterized by a dark brutality. Yet it also contains light and hope.
In 2007, American composer David Lang created a choral work based on H. C. Andersen's history, modelled on J. S. Bach's St. Matthew Passion, where the story of Jesus' death is interrupted with other texts that reflect and comment on the action. The texts that accompany Andersen's fairy tale are by H. P. Paulli (the first translator of the story into English, in 1872), Picander (the nom de plume of Christian Friedrich Henrici, the librettist of Bach's Saint Matthew Passion), and the Gospel according to Saint Matthew. Lang uses these compilations to focus on the essential feelings in the story – expressed in music that highlights the human voice.
The performance opens with an introduction by Kate Molleson (Music Journalist at BBC Radio 3, The Guardian and The Herald).
An American Master
Critic Tim Page described the piece as «deeply felt without ever delving into sentimentality, absolutely simple yet leaving nothing out», while The New Yorker wrote: «With this work — one of the most moving and original scores of recent years — Lang has solidified his standing as an American master.»
David Lang says this about his work:
What drew me to The Little Match Girl is that the strength of the story lies not in its plot but in the fact that all its parts—the horror and the beauty — are constantly suffused with their opposites. The girl's bitter present is locked together with the sweetness of her past memories; her poverty is always suffused with her hopefulness (…). There is a kind of naive equilibrium between suffering and hope. The word passion comes from the Latin word for suffering. There is no Bach in my piece and there is no Jesus – rather the suffering of the Little Match Girl has been substituted for Jesus's, elevating (I hope) her sorrow to a higher plane.
Introductions:
Saturday 25. May: Beth Morrison, music journalist for BBC Radio 3, The Guardian and The Herald, about Lang's music
Sunday 26. May: Discussion about the children's voice, Edle Stray-Pedersen (leader Children's Choir), Marianne Willumsen Lewis (song educationalist), Aksel Johannes Skramstad Rykkvin (baryton), Gisle Kverndokk (composer) and Siri Lindstad (journalist)