Ingvar Lidholm - Khoros - The Eric Ericson Chamber Choir, Eric Ericson (2005)

Born in 1921, the composer Ingvar Lidholm is the doyen of Swedish music. We recently released three CDs as a survey of his orchestral works, and now the time has come for this two-disc set of his music for choir a cappella. Containing the absolute majority of Lidholm's works in this genre, this release is also a documentation of the unique collaboration between the composer and the renowned choral conductor Eric Ericson. Most of these works, starting with Laudi from 1947, were actually written for the Eric Ericson Chamber Choir, an ensemble which has been described as 'the Mercedes of the choral world' and which is used by conductors such as Muti, Abbado and Levine for concerts and recordings. With the EECC as his instrument, Lidholm has created a choral style which is both virtuosic and expressive while ofet exploring moral issues, for instance in The Persians, a setting a scene from Aeschylus's tragedy, which in Lidholm's opinion deals with 'the curse of power-mad leaders throughout history, not least in our own time.' Texts from or about classical antiquity have often provided Lidholm with inspiration, for instance in Greek Gravestone and Two Greek Epigrams. Another major source of material has been the Swedish playwright August Strindberg: 'demented and deranged in many ways, a fantastic inspiration'. Lidholm has used texts by Strindberg in various works on this disc, such as the extracts from the opera 'A Dreamplay', in which the choir has an important musical function. These recordings, made between February 2003 and April 2005 with the composer taking an active part, might be considered the climax of almost 60 years of collaboration between two great makers of music: Eric Ericson and Ingvar Lidholm.

Composer: Ingvar Lidholm
Performer: Margareta Ljunggren, Lars Arvidsson, Stefan Dahlberg, Karl Magnus Fredriksson, …
Conductor: Eric Ericson
Orchestra/Ensemble: Eric Ericson Chamber Choir

Reviews: I sometimes notice that when contemporary composers turn from solo instrumental or orchestral composition to choral writing, their work can sound less adventurous and more traditional. Perhaps this phenomenon is born of pragmatism. Choirs may be disinclined to tackle music that stretches them by demanding perfect pitch or split-second precision. In a cappella choral music, the tricky moments are even more likely to be exposed. Maybe the rational composer recognizes these realities and writes accordingly.


The choir on these CDs, however, revels in such challenges. Eric Ericson, one of the great choral trainers of the 20th and 21st centuries, established his chamber choir in 1945 and remains active and much sought after today. (He made these recordings in his late eighties, between 2003 and 2005.) The Swedish composer Ingvar Lidholm (b. 1921) has composed around 25 works for unaccompanied voices, the majority specifically for these skilled performers, and to those collectors who know Lidholm?s texturally vibrant orchestral music let me simply say his choral output is equally gripping and detailed.


The works on these two discs were written between 1947 ( Laudi ) and 2003 ( Greek Gravestone ). They fall roughly into two periods, the first and most prolific extending to 1959, the second lasting from the late 1970s to the present. The earliest works, such as Laudi (three settings of passages from the Bible), take their cue from Stravinksy, but also bear a strong resemblance to the unaccompanied choral works of Benjamin Britten. Both composers like to build chords additively. (The setting in English of Ezra Pound?s Canto LXXXI is uncannily close to the spare, late vocal music of Britten.)


Some of Lidholm?s later pieces utilize 12-tone rows, such as the extended scena entitled The Persians , based on Aeschylus. Here technical hurdles become harder and Lidholm does the performers fewer favors in terms of cueing them in; nevertheless, the composer?s style is remarkably consistent (and tonal) across the decades. In his choral music, as in certain of his orchestral works such as Toccata et canto , Lidholm evokes the past?notably but not exclusively in the religious settings?tapping into the ancient world of plainchant that marked the beginnings of Western music as we know it. Part of the allure of these pieces is the feeling the listener gets of being connected to that long, historic continuum.


It must be said that both individually and collectively the Eric Ericson Chamber Choir members are virtuosos. Listen, for example, to the exciting, almost hysterical setting from 1994 of the Libera me , the first track on the second CD. The choir is required to sing glissandos doubled at the octave, dense cluster-like chords moving up or down chromatically, jump from one dynamic extreme to another, or keep long pedal notes going for several measures. It not only performs these feats but also, under Ericson?s sharp direction, uses them to bring the composer?s precise dramatic intentions to life.


Admittedly, when listening to this body of work consecutively, one might detect a certain sameness?Lidholm prefers homophony to counterpoint and never writes a fugue; which is only to say that this is a set for dipping into rather than devouring all at once. Treat it as an antidote to the jangling racket of the modern world: all the processed, digitized pollution that people pump into their heads, which invades our everyday lives by stealth. Away with it! There is something so noble in the sound of true, natural human voices flowing out into calm, reverberant space. Of course, the BIS engineers have captured that sound nobly.