Founded in 2021, the Vicentino Singers is a six-voice ensemble focussing on music from the 16th, 17th and 21st centuries. Our singers hail from far and wide, but we are all based in Finland and Estonia, so it is only fitting that our concert this evening presents a selection of new vocal chamber works from both sides of the Gulf of Finland.

The programme begins with Helena Tulve’s You and I (2018), a pensive, lingering setting of texts by the 13th-century Sufi mystic Rumi. As in many of Tulve’s vocal works, the text, while understated, reveals a restrained passion and intimacy, here brought out in the gentle ebb and flow of Tulve’s micropolyphony, at times simmering in the background, at others briefly erupting in bolder, more agitated gestures, giving the beguiling impression of a sprezzatura madrigal presented in slow motion.

You and I

Happy is the moment, when we sit together,
With two forms, two faces, yet one soul,
you and I.

The flowers will bloom forever,
The birds will sing their eternal song,
The moment we enter the garden,
you and I.

The stars of heaven will come out to watch us,
And we will show them
the light of a full moon –
you and I.

No more thought of “you” and “I.”
Just the bliss of union –
Joyous, alive, free of care, you and I.

All the bright-winged birds of heaven
Will swoop down to drink of our sweet water –
The tears of our laughter, you and I.

What a miracle of fate, us sitting here.
Even at the opposite ends of the earth
We would still be together, you and I.

We have one form in this world,
another in the next.
To us belongs an eternal heaven,
the endless delight of you and I.

(Translation into english Jonathan Star)

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The delicate, sensuous tone of Rumi’s poetry is echoed in the texts of Isabella Shaw, here presented in Sebastian Dumitrescu’s setting Flame and Shadow: Madrigal Fragments (2024). In this new work, Dumitrescu explores Nicolà Vicentino’s (1511–1575/76)‘enharmonic’ extended meantone tuning system, in which the octave is divided into 31 parts. The word ‘enharmonic’ should not be understood in the modern sense, as the notes that today we consider enharmonic equivalents (e.g. f# and gb) are here distinct pitches. Based on circles of pure major thirds, Vicentino’s system allows for many unexpected harmonic shifts, and the effect can be strangely yet pleasantly disorientating for performer and audience alike. Flame and Shadow: Madrigal Fragments was commissioned by the Vicentino Singers with generous funding from the Sibelius Fund of the Society of Finnish Composers.

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“What remains of a person?” asks the narrator in the final movement of Tze Yeung Ho’s Intermezzi (2021). Based on the novel Entré by Norwegian writer Linda Gabrielsen, Intermezzi follows a nameless mother as she spirals into a cycle of post-natal depression. The work is divided into five scenes or tableaux, a technique common to many of Ho’s vocal and operatic works. A woman finds herself in a courtroom surrounded by an array of witnesses. What has happened? She considers names for her child. Then she is being interviewed by the police. Why? Here, the ‘story’ of the mother is not told in linear fashion, or at all, rather the ‘intermezzi’ give us glimpses of a larger story that remains opaque, leaving the listener to imagine the wider context.

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Giacomo Leopardi (1798–1837) was one of the most important Italian poets and thinkers, whose work combines deep emotional sensitivity with philosophical reflection. The poem ‘L’infinito’ (1819) is his most renowned piece – a meditative and quiet glimpse into infinity. A limited view of the natural landscape sparks the poet’s imagination, leading him into the boundless, where losing oneself in the vastness of the universe brings a moment of peace. Liina Sumera’s setting (2025) expands on these themes, contrasting moments of stasis and slow harmonic change, an allusion to the infinity of the title, with faster, rhythmic gestures and Baroque ornaments briefly rising out of the texture, like a distant object coming in and out of focus.

L’infnito

Giacomo Leopardi (1798–1837)

[Sempre caro mi fu quest’ermo colle,
e questa siepe, che da tanta parte
de l’ultimo orizzonte il guardo esclude.
Ma sedendo e mirando, interminati
spazi di là da quella, e sovrumani
silenzi, e profondissima quiete
io nel pensier mi ngo; ove per poco
il cor non si spaura.]*

E come il vento
odo stormir tra queste piante, io quello
in nito silenzio a questa voce
vo comparando: e mi sovvien l’eterno,
e le morte stagioni, e la presente
e viva, e il suon di lei. Così tra questa
immensità s’annega il pensier mio:
e il naufragar m’è dolce in questo mare.

The Infnite

Giacomo Leopardi (1798–1837)

[Always dear to me was this solitary hill
and this brush, which many sides
of the distant horizon hides from view .
But sitting and marvelling, interminable
space there beyond, and superhuman
silence, and piercing stillness
do my mind envisage, until my heart
can endure no more.]*

And as the wind
I hear rustling through the foliage, the
in nite silence to that voice
do I compare: I remember eternity ,
and the seasons gone, and the one present
and alive, and its sound. And in that
immensity do my thoughts plunge:
and drowning is to me sweet in that sea.

(Translation: Matilda Colarossi)

* The text in square brackets is not used in the piece

*

The vastness of nature and the smallness of the human observer is at the heart of Galina Grigorjeva’s Siuaama amiakkui too. This is one movement of Grigorjeva’s large-scale choral work Between the Earth and Skies (2023), originally commissioned for the combined forces of the four Nordic professional chamber choirs. Written in the Greenlandic language, Katti Fredriksen’s poem is a meditation on fear, identity and ancestral memory, set against the elements of the natural world, its sheer immensity. Stylistically restrained but emotionally rich, it evokes a quiet tension between tradition and change, presence and absence, the sea and the sky. Grigorjeva’s musical language, imbued with a strong sense of history and tradition, lends the words a timeless, hymn-like quality, powerful in its simplicity. 

Like Dumitrescu, Juhani Nuorvala too is fascinated by the sonic possibilities of different tuning systems. The Three Madrigals (2007, rev. 2024) are settings of poems by the dramatist Michael Baran and are composed in extended just intonation, a system employing the pure intervals of the harmonic series. Tiny pitch fluctuations in triplet motion form the ‘calm surface’ (‘tyyni pinta’) of the opening, the same material building to a rhythmic section that presages much of the music in Nuorvala’s opera Flash Flash, composed around the same time. The second madrigal sounds almost medieval with pairs of voices moving in parallel fifths on a scale employing the eleventh partial. The third madrigal returns to the material of the first, mirroring and refracting the music. The final call to “wake and see, wake and hear, wake and know what was always thought” feels like a proclamation of faith, an invitation to experience a world of harmonic possibilities that, though it feels new, has always existed.

(Program notes: David Hackston)