Matthew Whittall: The World Tree – Helsinki Chamber Choir

Canadian-Finnish composer Matthew Whittall’s music fuses diverse influences — Old and New World, Western and non-Western, sacred and secular, classical, folk and popular — into a single, rich and varied expressive language.

For The World Tree, a work for a cappella choir, Whittall collaborated with Robert Macfarlane, an author internationally renowned for his writing on nature, people and place. The creative impulse behind the work was the illegal felling of the iconic Sycamore Gap tree in northern England in 2023. The result is an hour-long piece in ten movements exploring humanity’s relationship with nature.

The title refers to Norse mythology, in which the tree Yggdrasil is seen as connecting the visible world to both heaven and the underworld. As well as being a requiem for the Sycamore Gap tree, the work expresses the hope that a forest will be planted in its place. The World Tree is performed by the Helsinki Chamber Choir under its artistic director, Nils Schweckendiek — a collaboration that has produced numerous critically acclaimed recordings for BIS, notably the album Reconnaissance (BIS-2662), devoted to works by Kaija Saariaho, which won a Grammy Award in 2024.</p