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Radio 3 Live in Concert: CBSO - Jonathan Harvey's Weltethos

CBSO - Jonathan Harvey's Weltethos

21/06/2012

BBC Radio 3 - Radio 3 Live in Concert, CBSO - Jonathan Harvey's Weltethos

CBSO and Chorus/Edward Gardiner in the British premiere of Jonathan Harvey's Weltethos.

Live from Birmingham's Symphony Hall, Edward Gardiner conducts the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra and Chorus in the British premiere of Jonathan Harvey's Weltethos.

The British premiere of Jonathan Harvey's "Weltethos" - a vision in music - given as a culminating event of the Cultural Olympiad at Symphony Hall in Birmingham by the CBSO and CBSO Chorus and Childrens Chorus under Edward Gardiner.

"One day in 2006," recalls Jonathan Harvey, "I got a call from the manager of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, Pamela Rosenberg. Would I write a 90-minute whole-evening work for them with choir?... It was an idea of the most famous theologian in the world, she went on. The theologian was Hans Küng, who initiated and in 1995 became president of the Global Ethic Foundation (Stiftung Weltethos), which seeks to foster peace between the religions on the basis of common ethical principles and values. "These values", says Küng, "can be found in all the great religious and philosophical traditions of humankind. They need not be invented anew, but people need to be made aware of them again; they must be lived out and handed on." 


Harvey was entrusted with setting the visionary libretto for a number of reasons. The British composer was ideally suited to an ambitious project of this nature because he has always rejected the l'art pour l'art of music that is mechanistically constructed: "I think music has an important role to play in society because, in my opinion, it is the most spiritual of all the arts."
In composing Weltethos to Küng's libretto, Harvey has produced a choral-orchestral work of vast dimensions for mixed chorus, children's chorus and organ, whose six movements are dedicated to different religious or philosophical teachings: Confucianism as well as the five great world religions of Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity and Islam.

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