Le Choeur national danois et le choeur de chambre national danois. Voir le site
Assez curieusement, j'ai entendu ce choeur pour la première fois dans un extrait de "pupils of Messian" consacré à Messian, Xenakis et Stockhausen. Il fallait oser.
The Danish National Choir/DR (DNC) and the Danish National Chamber Choir/DR (DNCC)
When the Danish Broadcasting Council (the board of governors of the Danish national broadcasting corporation DR) held its meeting on 6th April 1932, Item 5 on the agenda was “The issue of the formation of a radio choir”. For a concert on 1st April that year, DR’s then director, the kammersanger (i.e. singer to the Royal Court) Emil Holm, had already gathered together a choir that was to appear in Verdi’s Requiem. The meeting was now told that the choir had been “very successful in purely artistic terms”. And the members of the Broadcasting Council were quickly convinced. Before they went home that evening, they had passed a resolution that DR was to have a permanent ensemble of singers – a radio choir.
The choir was on the one hand to perform with what was then known as the Danish Radio Symphony Orchestra, and on the other to give concerts as an independent ensemble. Over the years, however, the Danish National Choir/DR has developed much further than even the Royal singer Holm could have dreamt. Today DR has both the Danish National Chamber Choir/DR, at present with 24 singers, and the Danish National Choir/DR with 75. The singers have been conducted by icons like Sergiu Celibidache, Giuseppe Sinopoli and Herbert Blomstedt; they have toured Europe, the USA, Asia and Australia, and the repertoire ranges from the Bach passions and Beethoven’s Missa solemnis to brand new works by Nørgård and Pärt.
The Danish National Choir/DR has sung with most of the Danish orchestras. Besides DR’s own ensembles, it also works with the Copenhagen Philharmonic, Concerto Copenhagen and others. In recent years the Danish National Choir/DR has also made a strong mark with CD recordings. From 1989 until 2002, when Stefan Parkman was principal conductor, the choir had an exclusive contract with the English recording label Chandos and recorded around 50 CDs, both in collaboration with the Danish National Symphony Orchestra/DR and a cappella.
Time and time again the choir has garnered international recognition, not least for its handling of contemporary music. The level of ambition is world-class, and with an ensemble of permanent professional singers it has the rare potential to invest in the forces necessary to bear up these works.
A high point came in 1996 when the Danish National Choir/DR performed Stockhausen’s Welt-Parlament. The composer himself came to Copenhagen and worked with the choir for three weeks ahead of the concert. With his work he challenged all the soloist qualifications of the choir’s singers. Among other peaks of recent years we can mention a performance of Henze’s Symphony no. 9 conducted by Kurt Masur in Paris (2003) and a collaboration with the performance-art theatre Hotel Pro Forma on the Hans Christian Andersen show Jeg er kun skindød (“I only appear to be dead”) (2005), where a number of the members of the choir were again able to work as soloists and with individual dramatic expression on stage.
This focus on the personality of each individual singer is something the Danish National Choir/DR will cultivate in the coming years. The repertoire is to build to a great extent on works that have been composed for soloist ensembles, and the choir will challenge the traditional concert form.
In 2007 the Danish National Choir/DR will be celebrating its 75th anniversary and presenting a broad spectrum of choral music – from Romantic to brand new works. The same year the choir will be given a new structure, so that 18 full-time singers will form the basic choir for both the Danish National Chamber Choir/DR and the Danish National Choir/DR. The structure will entail a new kind of flexibility and increase the potential for travelling out in the country and presenting vocal music – also at schools and companies. The new basic choir will be named Vocalensemble / DR.
At present the Danish National Choir/DR is not working with a regular chief conductor. A number of the top choral conductors in Denmark and Europe are however being engaged from project to project, including Stephen Layton, who is the principal guest conductor of the choir. The Swedish conductor Fredrik Malmberg will act as permanent conductor for the Vocalensemble.
Nina Ørum