CHORAL MUSIC FROM ESTONIA: Sei la luce e il mattino (You Are Light and Morning) by the Estonian composer Tõnu Kõrvits

ALL ABOUT THE ARTS

A recently composed work for choir and orchestra, Sei la luce e il mattino (You Are Light and Morning) by the Estonian composer Tõnu Kõrvits has been released by ONDINE featuring the peerless pairing of the Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir and the Tallin Chamber Orchestra, beautifully led by Risto Joost,

The poetry of the 20th-century Italian writer Cesare Pavese, filled as it is with symbols about nature and their imprint on the life and death of human beings, is brought to life by Kõrvits in lyrical, meditative music, wherein elements of nature: wind, fire, water, earth are equated to aspects of the human condition: longing , regret, loneliness, love.

Kõrvits’ melodic, utterly Romantic, tonally-centered music is haunting and evocative, and his keen talent for text setting and tone painting is never more vividly present than in his setting of Pavese’s Tu sei come una terra (here in our translation) first sung by the chorus:

You are like a land that no one has ever uttered

You wait for nothing other than the word

Which like a fruit amidst tree branches

Will be dredged out of the bottom

It is a wind that nears you

Dried and dead things obscure you, swept away by the wind

Limbs and ancient words

You tremble in summer

A sample of the music of Tõnu Kõrvits: Peegeldused tasasest maast (The Northern Wild) – https://youtu.be/253-PI4uS5Q

Rafael de Acha www. RafaelMusicNotes.com 9/23/20

Published by ALL ABOUT THE ARTS

Rafael de Acha has enjoyed a distinguished career in the arts as a performer, stage director, producer, and educator. He was born and grew up in Cuba. At the age of 17 he moved to the United States to study Drama at the University of Minnesota, and later Languages at L.A. City College, Music at the Juilliard School of Music, at the University of Cincinnati’s College Conservatory of Music, and at the New England Conservatory of Music, from which he received the Master's degree. He has taught courses on the History of Music at the University of Miami’s Frost School of Music and at Florida International University, and contributed writings and reviews to Seen and Heard International (www.seenandheard-international.com ) and to this blog. He co-founded the award-winning New Theatre in Coral Gables, Florida, where he produced and staged twenty seasons of classical and contemporary theater, including fifty world premieres of plays that went on to have international and national productions on and off Broadway, including Ana in the Tropics by Nilo Cruz (Pulitzer Prize for Drama 2002 and Tony Nomination 2003.) In 2006 he was presented with a citation from The Dade County Cultural Affairs Council for “trailblazing contributions to the arts in South Florida.”