Paul Engel's Venetian Deja-vu is a virtuoso piece, which in a rather free manner is based both on the motet Jubilate Deo omnis terra and the well-known Sonata No. XIII for eight instrumental voices in two choirs by Giovanni Gabrieli. Even though this roughly 15 minute long composition cannot be regarded as sacred music, it was still composed for performance as part of a concert of church music. Engel's Te Deum is a piece in four movements of approximately 25 minutes in length which forms a musical arch beginning with the music for several voices of the occident and stretches to a modern, generally harmonic tonal language. Cyrillus Kreek worked like Bartok for many years as a musical researcher. He collected spiritual folksongs, which he catalogued and revised. He wrote 450 songs for choir with various voices and arranged 500 hymns in polyphony. In 1927, he completed his "Estonian Requiem" which is regarded as his masterpiece. Kreek's settings of David's Psalms form a kind of bridge between the comprehensive form of the requiem and the spiritual folksongs. They distinguish themselves through their emotional balance which is never monotonous. The Norwegian composer Knut Nystedt's "Immortal Bach" is based on the Bach chorale, Komm, susser Tod. Nystedt interprets this chorale in a manner typical for his style by attempting to unite the old with the new. |
