Nun komm...

I have always been fascinated by themes that have spanned the centuries and generated such diversity in their adaptation to the most distant eras and styles. The Gregorian melody Veni, redemptor gentium is one of those that has undergone many metamorphoses without ever disappearing. Luther made it into a chorale, Bach sublimated it, and so many Romantics would seize upon it.
In my turn, I saw in these four short choral periods a simple melody, of a gentle fluidity, which seems to carry within it the idea of a whirlwind that inexorably brings it back to its beginning. It is certainly the idea of this "temporal loop" that determines the arched form of this short symphonic poem in which each period becomes a thematic character that is superimposed on the others, hence a particularly polyphonic writing of the violin.
I will later take up this theme again in my 3rd Evocation for organ (2008) and try to take it further into this idea of superimposed layers of time. And it is in Psalmos , a concertante symphony for orchestra, that I will pursue this idea of a frenetic race towards a summit, before the piece plunges back into the depths of Eternity that this 12th-century theme seems to suggest.

(Thierry Escaich)