Maria Faust’s Sacrum Facere

Maria Faust’s Sacrum Facere

Saturday, 6 November 2021, 8.00pm

“Organ”

Maria Faust returns to Jazzfest Berlin, debuting the music from her astonishing 2020 album “Organ”. The project is a solemn memorial, and its presentation within the Kaiser Wilhelm Memorial Church promises to evoke the rarefied atmosphere of the original recording made in Tallinn’s rebuilt St. Nicholas' Church.

Live concert in Berlin / ca. 60 min

Maria Faust’s Sacrum Facere: “Organ”
Premiere

The Copenhagen-based Estonian composer, reedist, and bandleader Maria Faust has always followed her own path, emerging from a non-musical family to pick up the saxophone. After hearing Charles Lloyd when she was 18, she has never turned back. In recent years, she has employed a practice she calls ‘memory analysis’ to create music, drawing upon a mixture of collective memory, forgiveness, historical research and more innate recollections to develop new work. At this years’s Jazzfest Berlin she brings one of the most recent manifestations of this system to the city for the first time, performing music from her gorgeous 2020 album “Organ”. The recording was made in Tallinn’s rebuilt St. Nicholas' Church, which was destroyed during World War II, pitting her horn-rich chamber ensemble Sacrum Facere against the massive resonance of the church organ, played with a mix of invention and solemnity by Emanuele Maniscalco. Meticulously arranged, chorale-like voicings – articulated by Faust’s biting alto saxophone along with the tuba of Jonatan Ahlborn, the trombone of Mads Hyhne, the clarinet of Francesco Bigoni, and the tenor saxophone of Ned Ferm – produce a deliciously rich, reverberant mix of contrapuntal melodies and sparingly applied improvisation, with constantly shifting densities and charged dynamics. The music toggles between elegiac grace, muted military brass fanfares, and solos of searing tenderness, with each element woven together into a moving memorial of the past.

Maria Faust alto saxophone
Emanuele Maniscalco organ
Ned Ferm tenor saxophone
Francesco Bigoni clarinet
Tobias Wiklund trumpet
Mads Hyhne trombone
Jonatan Ahlborn tuba

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Published by Isabel Rojas on 18 October 2021

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