The Call of the Mountains

The call of shepherds in the Pyrenees; the only “text” of this piece is the cry “Eee-Ooo”. Vivancos, for years attached to the Escolania de Montserrat, weaves twelve voices around it, written out across the whole space of the hall. The whole evening takes its name from this wordless call.

The Marian antiphon in the version of the shepherds of Rouergue — a historic region of what is now Occitania — and the monks of the small town of Estaing. Austere, plain polyphony close to the Corsican tradition: here many voices are a form of community. From it comes the sentence that stands as the inscription over the whole evening: “Ad te clamamus”, to thee do we cry. The wordless call of the first piece is given words here. In recordings of this version the antiphon is closed by a Hail Mary recited in the Occitan dialect — “Adiu, Maria, siás tot de gràcia…” — a prayer in the speech the shepherds actually used.

The Canadian composer wrote it while gathering material for an opera about the events at Medjugorje, in a Bosnia then at war: six children to whom, from June 1981, the Mother of God was said to appear daily, and the crowd praying the rosary while it happened. Hence the six voices: six children, six parts, a piece for high voices alone. The fermata on the last, quiet bar is, in MacIntyre's conception, the moment of the apparition.

Corsican polyphony from the Franciscan tradition. The text is the last two stanzas of the hymn Pange lingua by St Thomas Aquinas (13th century), sung at adoration and most often at Benediction, as the Blessed Sacrament returns to the tabernacle.

St Thomas Aquinas again: the last two stanzas of the hymn Verbum supernum prodiens, written for Corpus Christi and sung at the exposition of the Blessed Sacrament. The same rite as a moment ago, in a language seven centuries younger: in Ešenvalds, layered harmonies and choral clusters.

From the cycle of twenty-one Church Songs op. 84, which Górecki wrote in Katowice in 1986 on melodies from Fr Jan Siedlecki's hymnal, the book Polish churches have sung from for generations. Minimal means, maximal effect. The original is Polish and says “Jesus, you are beyond understanding”; here the Latin version was sung, in which the same line says “Jesus, you come to us”.

A poem by the American poet Sara Teasdale about a solitary night beneath the stars. To the choir Ešenvalds added glass harmonicas — tuned glasses played with a wet finger — so that they would sound like a shimmer. The harmonies are open and spacious; this is the highest point of the evening, and the first half ends on it.

The first of the ten miniatures of Impressions d'enfance op. 28, childhood memories arranged by the course of a day: from the fiddler, through the cricket and the wind in the chimney, to the night storm and the sunrise. The ménétrier is the village fiddler, the one who plays at weddings. It opens the second half of the evening; the player is Radu Ropotan — like Enescu, a Romanian.

A madrigal from the fourth book of five-voice madrigals, published in Venice in 1603, on the threshold between Renaissance polyphony and the Baroque, as music begins to paint the affections. The bird that sings “so sweetly” is a metaphor for a heart in love: had it a human soul it would say “I burn with love”, and a second bird answers it.

From the third partita, part of the set of six sonatas and partitas for solo violin completed in 1720, masterpieces of the violin literature. Pure energy and lightness: the second moment in this programme when the violin is left alone, and the bridge between Monteverdi's bird and Vaughan Williams's lark.

A pastoral tone poem for violin, written in 1914 and revised in 1920; it waited six years for its first performance because the war had broken out. Its inspiration was George Meredith's poem about a lark rising towards the sky; the melodic line rises and falls in imitation of the flight. Paul Drayton rewrote the piece for violin and choir, so that Meredith's words — in the original only written above the notes — can here actually be heard.

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.