Hey people! 🙂
For today, I have a very beautiful, choral piece for you. As you can guess from the title, this composition is inspired by the beauty of Aurora Borealis. As i understand Ola Gjeilo-s – the composer – words about this piece, it is also inspired more generally by this serene, yet heartbreaking, or “terrible” as he says, kind of beauty. He was writing this on Christmas day, in an attic in Norway while northern lights were happening, and he thought that this phenomenon reflects this kind of beauty very well. Ola Gjeilo currently lives in the US, and says that Northern lights are one of his more Norwegian works. The lyrics come from the Latin translation of Song of Solomon.
The version of this piece that I am sharing with you is performed by a six-piece female choral ensemble from Leipzig called Sjaella. Sjaella is a made-up word based on the Swedish word själ meaning soul. I really love the sound of this composition sung by them. Here are the Biblical lyrics in English:
Thou art beautiful, O my love,
sweet and comely as Jerusalem,
terrible as an army set in array.
Turn away thy eyes from me,
for they have made me flee away.
My Inner MishMash 