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On February 1, the re:pi:n media will release a new Jüri Reinvere’s author CD+DVD Requiem. The CD presents Requiem for four male voices, flute, reader and live electronics (2009, text by Jüri Reinvere) and „Beneath the Burial Sky” for chamber choir. The music is performed by Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir, soloists Rainer Vilu, Aarne Talvik, Toomas Tohert and Mikk Üleoja (conductor), Helen Bledsoe (flute, USA) and Catherine Jarvis (text reader, Australia). An additional visual component to the Requiem can be found on DVD. Video, directed by Australian film director Catherine Jarvis, is based on the documentaries of the years 1911–1944 (found in the Estonian Film Archives), which shows everyday Estonian life before the Soviet occupation. |
Reinvere’s Requiem is an intensely philosophical and powerful work in the Catholic tradition of requiems. In its unusually intimate soundscape, with no mass scenes and very little dramatic action, Reinvere chooses to emphasize the individual psychological dimensions of grief and destruction with the use of dichotomic concepts such as life versus death, black versus white, freeze of anguish versus thaw of memory, Hegelian reason versus Augustinian faith.
The introducing text of the booklet of CD+DVD is written by Finnish writer Sofi Oksanen.
Jüri Reinvere was born and grew up in Estonia, he obtained musical education at the Tallinn Music High School, in the Warsaw Chopin Academy of Music and the Sibelius-Academy in Helsinki. Reinvere has lived a long time in Finland and Sweden, since 2005 he lives in Berlin, Germany. Through the decades, Reinvere has been known by his impressively transformational, highly versatile and subtile music, which also is characterized by unpredictability and unreality. Since the change of the millennium, Reinvere has also written a philosophical Estonian, Finnish and English poetry, which he often uses in his music.
Agnes Toomla