ESA-PEKKA SALONEN & SYMPHONY NO. 2 BY MAHLER
The Baltic Sea Festival celebrates its 20th anniversary with a jubilee concert featuring the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra, the Swedish Radio Choir and Eric Ericson Chamber Choir under Conductor Laureate Esa-Pekka Salonen in Gustav Mahler’s magnificent second symphony, The Resurrection. According to Mahler, “a symphony must be like the world, it must embrace everything”. Never has this quote seemed more relevant than in this magnificent symphony in which the composer takes the listener on an extraordinary musical journey with the help of the orchestra, choir and soloists – from the opening funeral march to the finale’s heavenly tones, radiant with light and hope.
Participants
The Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra is a multiple-award-winning ensemble renowned for its high artistic standard and stylistic breadth, as well as collaborations with the world’s finest composers, conductors, and soloists. It regularly tours all over Europe and the world and has an extensive and acclaimed recording catalogue.
Daniel Harding has been Music Director of the SRSO since 2007, and since 2019 also its Artistic Director. His tenure will last throughout the 2024/2025 season. Two of the orchestra’s former chief conductors, Herbert Blomstedt and Esa-Pekka Salonen, have since been named Conductors Laureate, and continue to perform regularly with the orchestra.
The Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra performs at Berwaldhallen, concert hall of the Swedish Radio, and is a cornerstone of Swedish public service broadcasting. Its concerts are heard weekly on the Swedish classical radio P2 and regularly on national public television SVT. Several concerts are also streamed on-demand on Berwaldhallen Play and broadcast globally through the EBU.
32 professional choristers make up the Swedish Radio Choir: a unique, dynamic instrument hailed by music-lovers and critics all over the world. The Swedish Radio Choir performs at Berwaldhallen, concert hall of the Swedish Radio, as well as on tours all over the country and the world. Also, they are heard regularly by millions of listeners on Swedish Radio P2, Berwaldhallen Play and globally through the EBU.
The award-winning Latvian conductor Kaspars Putniņš was appointed Chief Conductor of the Swedish Radio Choir in 2020. Since January 2019, its choirmaster is French orchestral and choral conductor Marc Korovitch, with responsibility for the choir’s vocal development.
The Swedish Radio Choir was founded in 1925, the same year as Sweden’s inaugural radio broadcasts, and gave its first concert in May that year. Multiple acclaimed and award-winning albums can be found in the choir’s record catalogue. Late 2023 saw the release of Kaspars Putniņš first album with the choir: Robert Schumann’s Missa sacra, recorded with organist Johan Hammarström.
The Eric Ericson Chamber Choir was founded in 1945 by the then 27-year-old Eric Ericson and has since been a prominent hub of the Swedish as well as the international music scene. The ensemble’s interest in continually finding new music and new fields of work has given them a very extensive repertoire: from early music to the very latest. For generations of Swedish and international composers, the choir has represented an ideal with its characteristic Nordic sound and skilful virtuosity. The Eric Ericson Chamber Choir is part of the international elite of professional ensembles. Fredrik Malmberg has been their choirmaster since 2013.
Esa-Pekka Salonen’s restless innovation drives him constantly to reposition classical music in the 21st century. Since 2020, he is the Music Director of the San Francisco Symphony. From 2008 to 2021 he was the Principal Conductor and Artistic Advisor for London’s Philharmonia Orchestra, where he is now Conductor Laureate. In London he launched the award-winning RE-RITE and Universe of Sound installations which have allowed people all over the world to step inside the orchestra through audio and video projections. Salonen also drove the development of a much-hailed tablet app, The Orchestra, which gives the user unprecedented access to the internal workings of eight symphonic works.
Salonen is Conductor Laureate for both the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra and the Los Angeles Philharmonic. He was Music Director of the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra from 1985 until 1995 and he was the Music Director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic from 1992 until 2009. Salonen co-founded the annual Baltic Sea in 2003. Salonen is also a composer and from 2015 to 2018 he was Composer in Residence at the New York Philharmonic. In 2020, he was appointed an honorary Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire (KBE) by the Queen of England. For the 2022/23 season, Esa-Pekka Salonen is the Berliner Philharmoniker’s Composer in Residence.
Julia Kretz-Larsson is the assistant first concertmaster of the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra since 2015. She is also a member of the chamber music ensemble Spectrum Concerts Berlin who, in addition to having their own concert series at the Berlin Phiharmonic, has performed at venues including Carnegie Hall in New York City and the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam. She is a former member of both the Lucerne Festival Orchestra and leader of the Mahler Chamber Orchestra.
She is also an active chamber musician, having performed with Janine Jansen, Isabelle Faust, Cecilia Zilliacus, Torleif Thedéen and others, and played at internationally renowned festivals in Salzburg, Utrecht and Schleswig-Holstein, as well as the Schubertiade in Voralberg and Vinterfest in Mora, Sweden. She has recorded chamber works for labels such as BIS, dB and Harmonia Mundi, and the 2018 album Amanda Maier vol. 3 was awarded a Swedish Grammy Award. As a member of the Julius Stern Piano Trio, she has won prizes at international competitions in Florence, Berlin and Trieste.
Julia Kretz-Larsson teacher violin at the Royal College of Music in Stockholm. She is a Berlin native, has studied under Professor Marianne Boettcher, under Professor Thomas Brandis at the Berlin University of the Arts, and in Prague for Josef Suk.
Chief conductor of the Jeune Choeur de Paris, he started a collaboration with the SWR Vokalensemble Stuttgart in 2013 (including a recording of Ravel’s Daphnis et Chloé), and also works regularly with the Chœur de Radio-France and the Choeur Accentus since 2014, for tours, radio performances, recordings, preparations and A Cappella concerts. He collaborates with many personalities, such as Sir Simon Rattle, Gustavo Dudamel, Daniele Gatti, Louis Langrée, Stéphane Denève, Daniel Harding, Laurence Equilbey, L. G. Alarcon… He has also conducted the WDR Rundfunkchor in 2016. In July 2016, he has prepared both the SWR Vokalensemble Stuttgart and the NDR Chor for Berlioz’s Romeo et Juliette. In 2017, he has participate to the opening of the Seine Musical conducting the choir accentus and in 2018, he starts a collaboration with the Croatian Radio Choir. Korovitch works for many festivals: the Mozartwoche in Salzburg, Recontres Musicales d’Evian, the Festival de Radio-France in Montpellier or the festival Mozart in New York.
For years, Swedish born Nina Stemme has been considered a leading singer of the most challenging parts in major dramas: Isolde, Brünnhilde and Kundry, Salome and Elektra, Fanciulla and Turandot.
Stemme is an artist who is in demand all over the world. Whether at the Metropolitan Opera New York, La Scala Milan, the Bayreuth Festival, the Vienna State Opera or the Royal Opera House in London – Nina Stemme has furthered the great tradition of Flagstad and Nilsson at leading opera houses.
She has been appointed Swedish Court Singer and Austrian “Kammersängerin”, received the “Premio Abbiati” critics’ award (2010), the Laurence Olivier Award for Outstanding Achievement in Opera (2010), the International Opera Award for the Best Female Singer (2013) and the Opera News Award (2013), to name but a few. The German specialist journal “Opernwelt” has crowned her Singer of the Year twice, in 2005 and 2012 and in 2018 she received the largest prize in the history of classical music; The Birgit Nilsson Prize.
Alongside the Tristan recording with Plácido Domingo as Tristan, and conducted by Antonio Pappano, Nina Stemme’s performance of Isolde has also been documented in the form of a live recording from Berlin under Marek Janowski as well as a television recording of her Glyndebourne performance by Nikolaus Lehnhoff. Her rendition of Walküre Brünnhilde is available as as a video recording of the La Scala production under Daniel Barenboim. The diversity and bandwidth of her repertoire is manifested in her interpretations of Zemlinsky’s König Kandaules, Aida, Jenufa, Der Rosenkavalier, and La Fanciulla del West.
Nina Stemme made her successful debut as «Dyer’s wife» in the anniversary production of Die Frau ohne Schatten at the Vienna State Opera May 2019, and has thus added another great Strauss role to her repertoire.
Internationally renowned Swedish soprano Miah Persson has worked all over the world as a recitalist and concert artist, as well as on the operatic stage.
Eminent conductors with whom she has collaborated include Sir Colin Davis, Daniel Barenboim, Antonio Pappano, Esa-Pekka Salonen, Sir John Eliot Gardiner, Nikolaus Harnoncourt, Sir Charles Mackerras, Marc Minkowski and Yannick Nézet-Séguin.
Miah Persson has appeared in many of the world’s leading opera houses, with career highlights such as the roles of Sophie in Der Rosenkavalier, Gretel in Hänsel und Gretel and Fiordiligi in Così fan tutte at the Metropolitan Opera, Susanna in Le Nozze di Figaro and Zerlina in Don Giovanni at Covent Garden, Sifare in Mitridate and Fiordiligi in Così fan tutte at the Salzburg Festival, Sophie and Susanna at the Vienna State Opera, Fiordiligi, Donna Elvira, Anne Trulove in The Rake’s Progress and the Governess in The Turn of the Screw at the Glyndebourne Festival, Fiordiligi at the Bayerische Staatsoper, as well as performances at the Aix-en-Provence Festival, Paris Opera, Frankfurt Opera, Theater an der Wien and Gran Teatro del Liceu in Barcelona. In 2011 Miah Persson was appointed court singer by the King of Sweden.
Programme
In spring 1888 Mahler embarked on what was to become the first movement of his second symphony. He completed it at the end of summer the same year. Mahler named the piece “Todtenfeier” (Funeral Rites), explaining that the music represented the funeral of the hero from his first symphony.
Five years passed before Mahler went back to work on his second symphony in 1893. That summer he was busy composing music to songs from the collection Des Knaben Wunderhorn. He set “Saint Anthony of Padua’s Sermon to the Fishes” to music for voice and piano. Mahler also wrote an orchestral version that formed the basis for the third movement scherzo and the fourth movement, “Urlicht” – with the text taken from another song in the Wunderhorn collection – as well as the second movement andante.
The finale, however, presented a problem. Mahler had been thinking about adding a chorus part to the finale for some time, but he was afraid it would be perceived as a cheap imitation of Beethoven’s ninth symphony. According to the composer, inspiration came to him unexpectedly when he in spring 1894 attended the funeral of the conductor Hans von Bülow, when a children’s choir began to sing Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock’s resurrection chorale from the organ loft. “I was as if struck by lightning …,” he later wrote in a letter. “Everything was suddenly revealed to me.” Mahler set two of Klopstock’s stanzas to music and added verses of his own for the final movement.
The second symphony was composed at a time when the formal arrangement of the symphony was under debate. An especially intense dispute was underway about the point of programmatic music. Should a symphony contain only non-representational music or should it symbolize an extramusical narrative? Mahler had himself an ambivalent relationship to programmatic music. He often wrote programmes for his own work, which he later discarded, as was the case with the second symphony.
One of the reasons for Mahler’s indecision was his fear that explicit programmes would lead to audiences making assumptions. I his opinion, they should be free to decide for themselves. Despite Mahler’s ambivalence, it might be interesting to contemplate some his thoughts on the symphony. The programme below is an abridged version of a statement that Mahler wrote for a performance in Dresden in 1901.
In the first movement we are standing by the coffin of a well-loved man. What is life – and what is death? Will we live on in all eternity? Is it all but a confused dream, or does life and death have a purpose? To go on living we need an answer to this question.
The andante portrays a joyful moment in the dear departed’s life and a doleful recollection of his youth and lost innocence.
The third movement expresses a sense of futility and despair; life appears nightmarish, which causes him to cry out loud in anguish.
The fourth movement represents a time when he hears the sweet voice of childish devotion. And, in the finale, humanity is confronted by the Day of Judgement. The Doomsday trumpets of the Apocalypse call every body and soul. In the silence we make out the song of a nightingale – a last echo of life on Earth. A chorus of saints and the heavenly host are alternating: “Rise again, yes, you will rise again!” Then we are touched by the grace of God. There is no punishment and no reward! An all-encompassing sense of love fills us with blessed understanding and a sense of presence!
Axel Lindhe
Approximate concert length: 1 hour 20 min (without intermission)
Tickets
More concerts
BAROQUE WITH L'ARPEGGIATA
L’Arpeggiata play early Baroque music mixed with jazz and latino rhythms. Together with the lutenist Christina Pluhar they perform a dance-inspired programme at Vasamuseet.
A PAEAN TO LOVE WITH THE SWEDISH RADIO CHOIR AND KASPARS PUTNIŅŠ
The Swedish Radio Choir celebrate all the different expressions of earthly love through some evocative works by 20th century French composers under the baton of Kaspars Putniņš. Live paintings by video artist Roberts Rubīns and painter Kristīna Rubīne. Etienne Glaser reciter.
CIRCUS CONCERT: THREADS
Cirkus Cirkör and The Swedish Radio Symphony Orhestra meet in the poetic performance Threads with music by composers from the Baltic Sea region.