Magnum

2022 - 9 - 27

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Image courtesy of "Classic FM"

O Magnum Mysterium: what are the lyrics, and which composers ... (Classic FM)

Composers as varied as Palestrina, Poulenc and Maxwell Davies have set it to music, but perhaps the best known is the haunting setting for unaccompanied ...

I’d look out the window and see a little crowd of people looking at their watch, and then at 4.30: bang, bang, bang on the door and in they would come!” O Magnum Mysterium was first performed on December 18, 1994 and was an instant success – its luminous, gently shifting harmonies perfectly expressing a timeless sense of serenity and wonder. “Many people have said that the serenity there, the closeness with nature and the abiding calmness have affected my music, and I think that’s true,” he says. But perhaps the best known today is the haunting motet for a cappella choir by the American composer, [Morten Lauridsen](https://www.classicfm.com/composers/lauridsen/) (1943-). Seeking inspiration, Lauridsen had taken to visiting local art galleries and, at the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena, he came across a painting that stunned him with what he described as its “unadorned, understated beauty” and “quiet radiance”. The choir had signed Morten Lauridsen as its composer-in-residence – this was his first commission.

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Image courtesy of "Magnum Photos"

We Are Family (Magnum Photos)

Colin Pantall talks to Jonathan Ferrari from AMI about the Paris-based fashion brand's extraordinary collaboration with Magnum. He also speaks with some of the photographers and artists who made work for the group project, discussing the ideas behind their ...

“I have to say this is the first time in my life when I kept up with the people I photograph and I go to things that won’t be good to photograph to show my respect, or show that my wife and I care. I think the title and the sensitivity of the royal family in Spain made the pictures unusable.” “So, I decided to project a more intellectual and unemotional idea of family, and I remembered this project, showed it to the curator and he said, ‘Oh, this is perfect.’ It started in 2018 at the Prado Gallery in Spain. But I’m as close to the bikers as you can be without being a biker. I remember the hunger, the lack of meat, and the cold.” They are paintings that project authority and power, paintings of people who would do everything they could to hold on to that power. “When I think about family I think about the place the family lives,” says Lee from her home in the United States. And that picture of the sea symbolizes the idea of family for her. The diversity of family life and custom was also a priority for AMI. Some are concrete representations, like Hiroji Kubota’s contact sheets that he links to the family of Magnum photographers he is a part of, while some are more conceptual, and some are more abstract, or darker. He thought of the family as a site of multiple possibilities, as something that goes beyond the image we have of the idealized family. “I directed myself towards the idea of the family.

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