The composer
Pauli í Sandagerði
Faroese composer. 207 works written between 1973 and 2022, with 60 poets, composers and arrangers.
Pauli í Sandagerði, born in Tórshavn in 1955, is a science teacher by training. His musical education was built up bit by bit under a number of teachers. His earliest interest was the piano, but in time working with choirs and composing superseded it, and it is as a composer that he is best known.
He has written music of many kinds: folk songs, rock music, lieder, choir music, sonatas, oratorios, music for piano, and chamber and orchestral music in a modern classical form. His main interest, however, is writing songs.
Pauli has been choirmaster for several revered choirs. One of them, Cantabile, a girls’ choir, is perhaps the busiest choir in the Faroe Islands; it has been very well received in countries from Norway to Greece, and on tour has worked with famous opera singers and orchestras from many countries.
He has been one of the pioneers of Faroese musical composition. His first large work, the Sonata for piano and flute of 1976, was very well received.
It was obvious that in this there was creative imagination and poetic depth… It is a great joy that such music is being created in this country, where we have excellent songs and choir music of our own, but until now had no Faroese instrumental music.William Heinesen, on the Sonata for piano and flute
Perhaps most impressive was the extract from Sandagerði’s mass, Jesus and the Macedonian, which had a sound and musical atmosphere of epic proportions.Deeside Piper and Herald, 1994
Although only a fraction of the catalogue has been published, many of these works have been played in concert and on radio in Norway, Iceland, Denmark, Sweden, England, Scotland, the USA, France, Japan and Greece, and almost every year some of them are recorded on CD by various artists.
The music is very varied, and varied within each category too — but in most of the detail of each composition, whatever kind of music it is, there is a trace of the inheritance of Faroese song: from the sea and the land, the church and the dance.