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Susan Swaney
Sven-David Sandström, a major contributor to "The Swedish Choral Miracle," 1 celebrated his 60th birthday in October 2002 with great fanfare in his native Sweden. A festival in his honor featured fifteen performances of his music, including five choral works, numerous chamber pieces, and the premiere of his second symphony. These days Sandström is finishing up a five-year teaching appointment at Indiana University, after which he will return to Sweden and devote himself to composing full-time. The Indiana University School of Music recently performed both his opera, Jeppe , and his monumental High Mass , which was also recently recorded by Herbert Blomstedt and the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra for a 2004 release on Decca.
Though Sandström's oeuvre includes some secular settings of Blake, Strindberg, Tomas Tranströmer and others, the majority of his choral music is set to sacred texts. There are technical tours de force from his early modernist period, such as the contrapuntally dense A Cradle Song/The Tyger (1978) for eight-part choir and eight soloists. There are two short choral works on early Baroque models ( Hear My Prayer, O Lord, based on Purcell, and Es ist genug, based on Buxtehude) and two very recent pieces using Bach motet texts. And there are numerous a cappella works in his more recent neo-romantic vein.
The larger choral works include High Mass (1993) for a large mixed choir, organ, orchestra, three soprano and two mezzo soprano soloists; an oratorio, Moses (1997), for soloists, chorus, organ and orchestra; and an early Requiem, "De ur alia minnen fallna" ("Mute the Bereaved Memories Speak", 1979) for soprano, alto, tenor and baritone soli, treble choir, mixed choir, orchestra and tape. The Requiem was controversial for its text, about which the librettist, Tobias Berggren, says: "The vulgar, violent language, the sadistic obscenities, the weary shabbiness, the dreary pettiness of that life in which murder lives, the sarcasm and irony of the mass, but also its pathetic and painfully paradoxical, poetically elevated language are naturally all intentionally created." 2 The compositional language of the Requiem is characteristic of Sandström's more avant-garde earlier works and also reflects the brutality of the text in its dissonance, indeterminate notation, swooping glissandi, and extreme tessituras and dynamics.
In addition, there are three other...