"Garden of Devotion"

The drive to set up this song cycle came from a collaboration with the Swedish soprano Lisa Larsson, to whom the piece is dedicated. The artistic click between them, when they met in 2010, lead at first to the re-arranging of the earlier song cycle “Orchestral Songs on Poems by Emily Dickinson” for mezzo-soprano. Martinsson: ‘Together we adapted the vocal part into the high version. Her dedicated collaboration gave me not only inspiration and self confidence, but also a lot of understanding for the voice and singing in itself.’

The five songs in Martinsson’s “Garden of Devotion” form a short story about neglected love. The composer used the texts in a different order than in Tagore’s book to achieve a dramatic scene. The five verses are fine examples of the elegant and refined expression of feelings. They are embedded in images of nature: birds, flowers, silent nights and stars. Martinsson says: ‘Tagore uses beautiful single words as inspiring and mind expanding metaphors which give me a universe of musical possibilities.’ In his music he creates an atmosphere of pent-up tension to colour the passionate emotions that lead a devoted woman to her friend in the garden of love.

Writing for string orchestra, Martinsson takes full advantage of the effects that strings can produce. The out-bursting motif of descending chords in the introduction of the first song, later on repeated, gives the thrill of passion in the dialogue. Soft and dark tone-colours describe the gloomy development in the second poem. The quivering strings, opening the last song, introduce the cynical conclusion to the love drama. For the vocal line Martinsson developed an embellished and subtle kind of singing that suites the courtly expression of the words. During 2018 Lisa Larsson will record the piece with the Netherlands CO/Gordan Nikolic at the Challenge Classics label.