A boundless delight in song pervades William Shakespeare’s entire œuvre of thirty-seven plays and one hundred and fifty-four sonnets. One might even feel that his writing is music. The Norwegian Soloists’ Choir, highly praised for previous releases, now present an entire album with music written to the texts of Shakespeare.
Telling what is told…
The title of the album is of course a Shakespeare quote, reflecting the fact that the texts these composers have written music to are well known parts of Western cultural history. When in addressing these universal texts yet again, allowing himself to colour them with his own music, each composer makes a unique interpretation of these famous lyrics.
Singing of another place
The person who wrote these texts has left a country existence in favour of a life in the boisterous city, in drawing-rooms, or at his desk. Maybe the encounter between a highly sensitive artist’s mind and the over-populated, modern metropolis of London, created the great song-writer Shakespeare? In his songs, Shakespeare sings of another place, the place where he grew up and experienced his first love; the meadows and the woods surrounding the village of Stratford.
The Norwegian Soloists’ Choir
Established in 1950, its first conductor Knut Nystedt, the choir has given over two hundred premier performances of which over seventy have been of works by Norwegian composers. Since 1990 the choir has sung under the leadership of Grete Pedersen, internationally acclaimed for her stylistically assured and musically convincing performances. Through a great number of concerts in Norway and abroad, recordings for radio and television, and CD recordings, she has become one of the most noted and sought-after conductors in the Nordic countries.
