Experience the lore of the lur!
This Sunday night on “The Lost Chord,” it’s a stoic start to the new year, with musical settings of the Icelandic Eddas.
Enjoy selections from “The Rheingold Curse,” after the “Volsunga Saga,” the earliest written sources of the ancient Germanic myths (including those of Sigurd, Loki, and Fafnir). We’ll hear them in imaginative, though scholarly-informed, realizations by Benjamin Bagby and the ensemble Sequentia.
Then we’ll turn to “The Creation of the World,” Part One of a bold, massive “Edda” oratorio by Icelandic composer Jón Leifs. Odin and his brothers defeat the giant Ymir, and from him fashion Earth, Sea, and Heavens, and soon after create the first man and woman from two trees. With its horn-helmeted, grunting choruses, laconic pounding, and austere poetry, this one will have you shouting for more mead.
It’s a new year of swan’s bone flutes, tuned rocks, and Nordic lurs (reconstructions of ancient Viking horns), on “Cold Comfort,” this Sunday night at 10:00 EST, on WWFM – The Classical Network and wwfm.org.