The Beauty That Still Remains is a full-length choral work by Norwegian composer Marcus Paus, that is based on The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank, and has received critical acclaim.
Go outside and try to recapture the happiness within yourself; think of all the beauty in yourself and in everything around you and be happy.Guy Rickards noted in Gramophone:[8] The sentiment of that quote, its focus on the positive in a time of dire peril, is the pillar around which Marcus Paus' extraordinarily beautiful cantata is constructed, encapsulated in the last of its eleven movements, "Epilogue," setting those very words in an outpouring of melody that is captivating and heartbreaking in equal measure (...) Something of the power of Paus’ conception derives from the primary use of a girls’ chorus as the main musical channel, many of the singers—in any performance—therefore of an age with Anne Frank when she wrote those words, and was then betrayed and transported to the death camps.
There is a real sense of fusion, counterpoint and cross-fertilisation between the musical strands here, such that while I referred above to The Beauty That Still Remains being a ‘cantata’, I could with equal justification term it a concerto for accordion with choral accompaniment.
The Finnish composer Mikko Heiniö has achieved a similar intensity of blend in some of his piano concertos (albeit not quite as uniformly successfully as Paus here) and the ultimate progenitor of this type of work is the incomparable Wirklicher Wald of Arne Nordheim.
"[1] Dominy Clements noted that the album is "filled with intriguing juxtapositions, with children’s songs and games rubbing shoulders with Gregorian chant, spoken word and beautiful singing and all kinds of theatrical scenes being created and as quickly dissolved into jaw-dropping moments of unexpected stylistic and musical counterpoint.