ESCAPE, the theme for Olavsfest 2025, is explored musically in this year's opening concert when two high-level choirs interpret some of our most beautiful choral works in Nidaros Cathedral. 

The major task has been given to Utopia & Reality Chamber Choir and Nidaros Vokal, both under the direction of conductor Ragnar Rasmussen. 

ESCAPE is a strong word. It immediately gives associations to the physical and vitally necessary escape from imminent danger, war and natural disasters. One flees from something unsafe in order to find safety. 

But in other life situations we can talk about other types of escape, where the escape itself represents a feeling of freedom and a longing for freedom: Birds in flight, the flight of thoughts, the flight of tones. 

The opening concert at Olavsfest-25 illuminates precisely the content of the concept of escape. A total of 45 singers divided into two choirs, the international Utopia & Reality Chamber Choir and Trondheim's own Nidaros Vokal, interpret the concept of escape through an ambitious and exciting repertoire:
 

Swedish Anders Hillborg's groundbreaking work "Myouyayoum" creates a meditative overtone escape that puts us as listeners in direct contact with the universe itself. 

Ragnar Rasmussen, conductor and artistic director of both choirs, describes the work as a musical equivalent to the northern lights: 
- The work has been called "unsingable". It is not, but it requires top-quality singers to be able to create the meditative overtone escape. where the notes fly like thought or bird, says Rasmussen.

The evening's premiere is a new work by the international, but Trondheim-based composer Kim André Arnesen. A work for a cappella vocal ensemble, where he sees the word "escape" through his own artistic lenses. 

The Swiss composer Frank Martin did not want his fantastic "Mass for Double Choir" to ever be performed. He believed this was a matter only between himself and Our Lord. Is this work an escape from the trivialities of the world and into an all-consuming spirituality? 

Sir James MacMillan's "Miserere" is a contemporary work where the present embraces the past, here represented by a fragment of Gregorio Allegri's "original" "Miserere mei, Deus". Macmillan's amazing work is a plea for mercy for humanity's inability to live in peace and harmony with itself and its surroundings - and thus itself creates extreme conditions that lead to war and the climate crisis. 

- This is some of the most beautiful things written by a living composer. Music I want at my own funeral, says conductor Rasmussen. 

The concert ends with Samuel Barber's beautiful and tragic "Agnus Dei". A work that many people associate with the heartbreaking escape scene in "Platoon", one of the strongest anti-war films of all time.