When (Mixed Choir) [Alf:98-MB1980]

The work When was written for twenty-four voices and one cello. In this work I employed an excerpt from Act III Scene 2 of William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, where these exquisite sentences are uttered by Juliet in Romeo's absence. The work was premiered in April 2016, exactly 400 years after the death of Shakespeare.I wanted to create a meditation and did my best to expand the boundaries of time-space by choosing a distinctly slow tempo to achieve a sense of infinite eternity. The work is a dialogue between two dimensions: the secular (main choir) and the eternal (semi-chorus), with the cello creating a bridge of light between the two. - from notes by Jekabs Jancevskis Âİ 2020