Composition by Max Bruch, SATB choral arrangement by Bruno Gousset, text by Bernard Lallement
Bruno Gousset tells us:
"Bernard Lallement had suggested to me a long time ago that I should do a choral arrangement of the adagio from Max Bruch's 1st Violin Concerto, which he particularly loved. So I drew up a sketch (transposed from E flat major to B flat) grouping together the main melodic motifs, so that he could write a poem that could be adapted to the music. I wanted lyrics on the theme of the serenity of the evening or night, a rather abstract, almost philosophical feeling. A great admirer and imitator of Parnassian poetry, he concocted, thanks (if you can call it that) to the confinement of 2020, a description - much more concrete than I had imagined - of a landscape, which he reworked several times to remove some aspects that were too 'palpable', in particular the sudden appearance of a troop of korrigans that he decided to suppress. Everything took place via computer exchanges, as we didn't have the opportunity to meet. I have wonderful memories of these exchanges at a very uncertain and difficult time, and that was the last time we worked together during his lifetime.
Having respected the harmony and writing of the original, the style of this piece belongs to German Romanticism. So there are no real difficulties in understanding and intonating the melodic lines. However, my interest in polyphony does lead to superimpositions of text that need to be clarified during performance, especially as it was not always easy to make vocal a piece of purely instrumental material that I did my utmost to respect. It is also necessary to know how to move from meditative episodes (the beginning and the end) to a moment of more intense lyricism (bars 38 and following), brought in gradually from bar 30."
Duration: approx. 3'45 
