HUSH

A lullaby can calm, but it can also carry wounds. A ritual gathers, but can also summon worlds on the edge of disappearance.

Claudia Jane Scroccaro has spent time with women living in shelters in the Paris area. Their stories were, at times, so traumatic that they could not be told directly, or at least, so the composer felt, they were not hers to tell. Instead, she asked the women to sing their lullabies. These became the material for On the Edge. Written for voice, choir and electronics, the piece explores the boundaries between virtual and real spaces, between imagined voices and those on stage.

Timna, capital of the ancient kingdom of Qatabān in Yemen, was destroyed and abandoned following its conquest by Hadramaut around 150 AD. For Palestinian composer Samir Odeh-Tamimi, ancient Arab and Near Eastern histories are not only the past, but ways of making present erasures felt. His work Timna evokes a ritual that might once have been practised in its temples. The choir sings in a language drawn from archaic Arabic, invented by the composer himself.

Camille Norment closes the evening with Wonderful Marvelous – fugue state, written especially for Det Norske Solistkor and the artist herself. The work uses voice, body and acoustic feedback to explore our relationship to memory, love and desire.

Programme

Claudia Jane Scroccaro On the Edge (2023/24) for six soloists, choir and electronics.

Samir Odeh-Tamimi Timna (2018–2020) for mixed choir, flute, viola, cello, double bass and percussion.

Camille Norment Wonderful Marvelous – fugue state (2026), world premiere

Want to know more?

• HUSH invites you to lie down and close your eyes. This is not about rest, but listening in a heightened state.
•  This concert marks a new chapter for the Norwegian Soloists' Choir: Yuval Weinberg leads his first Oslo concert as artistic director.
• Jane Scroccaro's On the Edge was composed after a long exchange with the SWR Vokalensemble and Weinberg, who was their chief conductor. It had its premiere at Donaueschingen in 2024.
• Wonderful Marvelous – fugue state and Norment's sound installation Wonderful, Marvelous at Atelier Nord share the same material: songs of the charged era surrounding WWII, based in love, desire, and sometimes serene optimism.