Wicki has to deal with a merciless time corset: The music has to match the movie exactly – preferably to the centisecond. The consequence: minimal freedom, maximal concentration.

It has become almost a cliché, in the realm of serious choral music, to refer to the “Swedish Choral Miracle”– the development, since World War II, of a phenomenally high-level choral culture, based in Sweden but spreading throughout the Scandinavian countries and east to Finland and the Baltic republics.