The Nordic Choir Expedition - Tenso days 2016 | Helsinki Chamber Choir

Centuries-old words, new music. Lotta Wennäkoski has set an 8th-century Japanese tanka by Abe no Iratsume in translations to five different languages, drawing on the properties of each language to bring out five quite different interpretations of the same short poem. The Swiss composer Beat Furrer became fascinated by the prophecies of Leonardo da Vinci some years ago and has based a series of evocative and deceptively simple miniatures on these mysterious writings. Alex Freeman, an American who has made his home in Finland, has put together his own selection of water-related lines from the works of William Shakespeare to mark the 400th anniversary of the great playwright’s death, creating a sonorous and powerful seascape. The only work in the programme based on a contemporary text is Perttu Haapanen’s sino phonia, paronomasia, in which the composer transforms an excerpt from poet Markku Paasonen’s Songs of a Town Sunk Under the Sea into “something rich and strange” with his playful approach to the sound and meaning of words.