In the poetry of the Estonian poet Viivi Luik, the colour of autumn leaves is painfully red. Her evocative visions of the melancholiest season of the year, contained in the cycle Sügismaastikud, were set to music by Veljo Tormis in the last century. The fourth movement (Valusalt punased lehed) is a miniature, bitter reflection on the transience of nature’s beauty, embodied by blood-red autumn leaves, trampled underfoot and mingled with the mud.

Several years ago, three of the fourteen monumental abstract canvases by Mark Rothko, which have filled the non-denominational chapel in Houston since 1970, were damaged in a hurricane. The painter did not live to see the completion of the building, which was opened shortly after his death by suicide. It was then that his friend Morton Feldman created a musical monument organically bound to this extraordinary place. Feldman’s Rothko Chapel, scored for two solo voices, choir and a small instrumental ensemble, is a sonic contemplation of the paintings and of the space that houses them. The patches of colour in the wordless choral writing correspond both to the non-denominational character of the chapel and to the expressive language of Rothko's paintings.

The combination of choir, organ and solo saxophone is an unusual one in the context of the Latin texts of the Requiem Mass. Yet it is precisely this sound-palette that James Whitbourn created in his Requiem canticorum of 2010—a work at once austere and deeply meditative.

By contrast, Francis Poulenc’s Mass in G major for a cappella choir is a veritable fusion of colours, like a stained-glass window illuminated by the southern sun. Widely regarded as one of the greatest masterpieces of twentieth-century sacred music, it was composed following the composer’s spiritual reawakening, brought about by the death of a close friend. The work abounds in vitality, light and richly coloured harmonies, whose performance demands exceptional precision from the singers.

Bartłomiej Gembicki