In Praise of Creation

Borkowski was born in 1934 in Pabianice. From 1966 to 1968 he studied in Paris with Nadia Boulanger, Olivier Messiaen and Iannis Xenakis, and then taught for more than forty years at the Warsaw Academy of Music, twice serving as its vice-rector. In his choral music he usually takes a single Latin word or a short phrase and builds a whole piece from it on abrupt shifts of register and dynamics. He returns to the same texts several times and numbers the settings: there are three Pax in terra, three Ave. Alleluia. Amen, two Libera me. In 2012 he wrote two Glorias, the first for women's choir, the second for mixed choir.

Light comes back in Borkowski's titles several times: Lux aeterna for choir and orchestra (2008–⁠2011), Lux for choir a cappella (2010) and Lumen from 2016. Medieval Latin distinguished lux, light in its source, from lumen, the light that travels out from it and illuminates. The piece begins at the edge of audibility and rises to a climax several times.

Francis composed the Canticle in the Umbrian vernacular around 1225 at San Damiano, ill and almost blind; it is one of the oldest poems in Italian literature. It was not written all at once. Francis added the stanza on those who forgive to reconcile the quarrelling bishop and podestà of Assisi, and the stanza on sister death when he was told that he himself was dying. Orff, the composer of Carmina Burana, set the Canticle in 1954 as the second part of the collection Concento di voci. He carries the text in recitative, close to speech and on the rhythm of the syllables, so the whole of it passes in one unbroken span.

Thaïs, staged in Paris in 1894 after Anatole France's novel, tells of a monk from the Egyptian desert who travels to Alexandria to convert a famous courtesan. The Méditation is the orchestral interlude between the two scenes of the second act: Thaïs is left alone with what he has told her and decides to follow him. Not a word is sung; the solo violin carries the whole change. The same theme returns in the last act, when Thaïs dies a saint in a convent and the monk who converted her confesses his love at her deathbed.

Ešenvalds sang for nine years, until 2011, in the State Choir Latvija. He wrote Stars the same year, commissioned by the Salt Lake Vocal Artists of Utah, to a poem by Sara Teasdale, who in 1918 received the first Pulitzer Prize awarded for poetry. To the choir he added glass harmonicas: water-tuned glasses played by running a wet finger round the rim. Their sound was meant to recall the twinkling of stars.

Vaughan Williams began it in 1914, for violin and piano. When war broke out he enlisted, already past forty, as a private in the Royal Army Medical Corps, and the piece waited: Marie Hall, its dedicatee, gave the first performance only in 1920. It was inspired by George Meredith's poem about a lark; the composer copied twelve of its lines onto the score. Paul Drayton arranged it for the Swedish Chamber Choir: the violin plays the original solo part, and the choir takes the place of the orchestra. It sings mostly without words, and in the middle section sets Meredith's lines under the music.

Sykulski wrote it to a commission from Agnieszka Franków-Żelazny for the Polish National Youth Choir: as a vocalise, without words. Something was missing from it, though — “the piece carried no message”. So the composer sent the score to a friend, who in the course of a single night wrote a whole story into it, fitted so exactly that not one note had to change. A girl from Podzamcze weeps over the frozen Prosna, the mill has stopped, there will be no bread, and John of Nepomuk, patron of bridges and rivers, stands beside her.

Enescu finished Impressions d'enfance on 10 April 1940, at fifty-eight. It is ten childhood pictures played without a break and laid out like a single day: from the village fiddler, through the cricket and the wind in the chimney, to the storm at night and the sunrise. Ménétrier opens the cycle and is the only one without piano. Enescu's first lessons, at four, came from a village fiddler, the lăutar Niculae Chioru; he dedicated the cycle to the memory of Eduard Caudella, his first violin professor, from the conservatoire in Iași. The player was Radu Ropotan, a Romanian like Enescu.

The last two lines of the Dies irae sequence: a plea that comes in the Mass for the dead once the image of judgement has passed. Since the late 1990s Borkowski has been setting the texts of the liturgy for the dead one by one: the Dies irae is his Symphony No. 1, and there are also Libera me, Lux aeterna and Symphony No. 3 “Requiem”, written from 1998 to 2011. Dona eis requiem I dates from 2015. The same words return throughout: the plea swells, then fades, and the final “dona eis requiem” is barely audible.

Dubra was born in 1964 in Riga and started out in Soviet Latvia, where his religious music got him into trouble with the authorities. He kept writing it, and sacred music is still most of what he writes; he says he does not create music, he only writes down what has been sent to him. The text of Stetit Angelus is an antiphon the liturgy sings as the offertory on the feast of St Michael the Archangel, while the gifts are prepared. The tenor carries the words, and the rest of the choir holds long, flowing chords around him.