Aniara - fragments of time and space (2023/2024)

Aniara - fragments of time and space

aug.

Wednesday 20:00

Talk at Vrak – Museum of Wrecks is included in concert ticket

EVENT DATE PASSED

Harry Martinson’s epic poem Aniara of 1956 has been both an operatic and a cinematic inspiration. The year 2019 saw the premiere of Aniara: fragments of time and space, in which the American composer Robert Maggio, the Grammy-winning chamber choir The Crossing and Finland’s Klockriketeatern created a choral-theatre work based on Martinson’s highly topical space epic. Don’t miss this experience of the highest international level.

There are flashing lights (strobes) in the performance.

Original support for Aniara was provided to The Crossing by The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage, Philadelphia.

The concert is broadcast live on Swedish Radio P2

Participants

The Crossing

The Crossing is a professional chamber choir conducted by Donald Nally and dedicated to new music. It is committed to working with creative teams to make and record new, substantial works for choir that explore and expand ways of writing for choir, singing in choir, and listening to music for choir.

Many of its nearly 160 commissioned premieres address social, environmental, and political issues. With a commitment to recording its commissions, The Crossing has issued 29 releases, receiving two Grammy Awards for Best Choral Performance (2018, 2019), and eight Grammy nominations.

Klockriketeatern

Klockriketeatern is a swedish-speaking theater company based in Helsinki, Finland.
Their name comes from the first production: Harry Martinson’s The Road (Vägen till Klockrike) in 1991. Klockriketeatern operates without a permanent theater space and with collaborations with theaters, groups and artists both in Finland and internationally as key to their productions, as well as multilingualism as an artistic practice. Klockriketeatern moves across boarders to new places, asking questions, staying curious, with a great interest in the human experience and the artistic process.

Donald Nally, conductor

Donald Nally is responsible for imagining, programming, commissioning, and conducting The Crossing of Philadelphia; he is the John W. Beattie Chair in Music and director of choral organizations at Northwestern University; he has served as chorus master for Lyric Opera of Chicago, Welsh National Opera, Opera Philadelphia, Spoleto USA, The Chicago Bach Project, Haymarket Opera Company, and the Spoleto Festival in Italy. He is the recipient of the distinguished alumni merit award from Westminster Choir College, and both the Louis Botto Award for Innovative Action and Entrepreneurial Zeal and the Michael Korn Founders Award from Chorus America; he is the only conductor to have two ensembles receive the Margaret Hillis Award for Excellence in Choral Music: The Choral Arts Society of Philadelphia and The Crossing.

Dan Henriksson, director & librettist

Dan Henriksson has been the Artistic Director and General Manager of Klockriketeatern since 2005, carrying out many national and international co-productions; he has directed both theater and opera works and worked as a professional actor for theater, film, TV and radio in Swedish, Finnish and Russian languages; his dramaturgical works include librettos, translations and adaptations; he has taught for twenty years at the University of the Arts/Theater Academy of Helsinki.

Marko Luppala, clarinet

Iida Sinivalo, flute

Jarmo Julkunen, guitar

Magdalena Meitzner, precussion

Pekka Saarikorpi, percussion & Peking opera

Carl Alm, actor

Matti Raita, actor

Antti Silvennonien, choregrapher & dancer

Antti Silvennoinen is a performer, choreographer and director. He is the artistic director at Wusheng Company, which has specialized in using techniques and means from traditional Chinese Peking opera. He has studied the art form in Beijing, China since 2005, and done a lot of collaboration with Chinese theater academy NACTA.
Selected works of Wusheng Company include, as performer, director and/or choreopgrapher: Hidden faces (Wusheng Company), physical theater and dance, based on Japanese ghost stories; The Last Warrior (in collaboration with Helsinki festival, Tero Saarinen Company and National Academy of Chinese theatre arts), traditional Peking opera play in Finnish; The righteous general (with Klockriketeatern and National Academy of Chinese theatre arts), traditional Peking opera play in Finnish and Swedish.

Kevin Vondrak, assistant conductor

Paul Vazquez, sound design

About the concert

I had imagined a paradise for them
but having left one that we destroyed
we had but the empty night of space as our home
an endless maw where no god heard us.

Harry Martinson’s words from the space epic Aniara maybe sound more ominous than ever. The story of the spaceship Aniara’s crew has inspired and fascinated composers, filmmakers and artists ever since its issue in 1956. A mere three years later, for example, Karl Birger Blomdahl and Erik Lindegren’s eponymous opera was premiered, and to this day it is held to be one of the greatest successes in the history of Swedish opera.

Martinson’s work comprises 103 songs about those on board Aniara, a spaceship that routinely transports to Venus and Mars 8,000 inhabitants of the planet Doris (Earth), which nuclear weapons and environmental destruction have rendered uninhabitable. The journey does not go as planned, and Aniara is soon shooting through space like a spear without aim or direction. On board the travellers seek solace in religion, sex and philosophy, and initially in Mima – a sort of omniscient computer on which is stored mankind’s entire history. Over time Mima comes to be seen more and more like a goddess, but it ultimately cannot cope with the burden of all the dreadful insights into the death of mankind. Aniara is in many ways a cosmic story of humanity at a crossroads.

Donald Nally, conductor and artistic director of the Grammy-winning chamber choir The Crossing, calls Aniara: fragments of time and space, a choral-theatre work, and it is a coproduction of the choir and Finland’s Klockriketeatern in collaboration with Wusheng Company and Finnish National Opera. The music is by Robert Maggio, an American composer who already has many chamber and choral works under his belt. The libretto is by Dan Henriksson, artistic director of Klockriketeatern, and is based on Martinson’s lyric poetry. The work has previously been successfully performed in Philadelphia, at Haarlem’s Koorbiennale and at the Finnish National Opera in Helsinki.

Donald Nally describes Aniara: fragments of time and space and the work on this opus thus:
I want to create a work that
helps me understand chaos.
I want to create a work that
reminds me of the miracle of Planet Earth,
even though we are ourselves threatening that miracle.
I want to create a work that allows
me to see the world, and my emotional
reactions to it, with greater clarity.
I want to create a work that allows
me to understand those feelings.
Aniara does – and will do – this.