last spring (2015) 5'

program note

last spring was written for the Edvard Grieg Kor in Bergen, Norway. I had the idea to make something out of the text that Grieg had used, in what is probably his most famous choral work – Våren. The word means ‘Spring’ but this elegiac text, by the Norwegian poet Aasmund Olavsson Vinje, is often translated into English as ‘Last Spring,’ since it is a moving description of an old man watching Winter change into Spring, not knowing if he will live to see another. I was working on this piece in Maine, as a guest of the art patron Marion ‘Kippy” Boulton Stroud, when she died suddenly, and it made the text much more immediate for me – more wistful, more emotional, more real.

last spring is dedicated to the memory of Kippy Stroud.

— David Lang

Libretto

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