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Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde

Nina Stemme and Daniel Johansson take on the title roles in this concert version of Richard Wagner’s legendary opera Tristan and Isolde. We will also see Christian Gerhaher, Irene Roberts and Christof Fischesser, the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra, the choir Orphei Drängar and Music Director Daniel Harding in this iconic piece about a love larger than death.

Due to illness, Falk Struckmann will replace Christof Fischesser in the role of King Mark of Cornwall.

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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.

Daniel Harding is Music and Artistic Director of the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra, with whom in 2022 he celebrated his 15-year anniversary. In the 2014/2015 season, he devised and curated the celebrated Interplay Festival, featuring concerts and related inspirational talks with renowned artists and academics. As Artistic Director, he continues this type of influential programming. Harding is also Conductor Laureate of the Mahler Chamber Orchestra, with whom he has worked for over 20 years, and Music Director of Youth Music Culture, The Greater Bay Area in China. The 2024/2025 season will be his first as Music Director at the Academia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia in Rome.

Harding is a regular visitor to the world’s foremost orchestras, including the Wiener Philharmoniker, Berliner Philharmoniker, Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, Symphonieorchester des Bayerischen Rundfunks, Staatskapelle Dresden and the Orchestra Filarmonica della Scala. In the US, he has appeared with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, The Cleveland Orchestra, Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Los Angeles Philharmonic, New York Philharmonic, and the San Francisco Symphony. A renowned opera conductor, he has led acclaimed productions at the Teatro alla Scala Milan, Wiener Staatsoper, Royal Opera House at Covent Garden, and at the Aix-en-Provence and Salzburg Festivals. He was Music Director of the Orchestre de Paris, the Anima Mundi festival of Pisa, and Principal Guest Conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra.

Daniel Harding tours regularly with the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra, performing at prestigious venues all over Europe and the world, and has recorded several acclaimed and award-winning albums with the orchestra. His tenure as Music and Artistic Director will last throughout the 2024/2025 season. “It is increasingly rare that the relationship between a conductor and an orchestra not only lasts for more than a decade, but keeps growing,” he says about working with the orchestra.

In 2002, Harding was awarded the title Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Government, and in 2017 nominated to the position Officier des Arts et des Lettres. In 2012, he was elected a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Music. In 2021, he was appointed Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire. Daniel Harding grew up in Oxford, England, and played trumpet before taking up conducting in his late teens. He is also, since 2016, a qualified airline pilot.

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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.

Daniel Johansson is a tenor from Braås in the province of Småland, who went from hard rock to opera and was likened to a young Pavarotti by Frankfurter Allgemeine for his interpretation of Rodolfo in Puccini’s La bohème. In 2018, he will be performing at the Royal Swedish Opera in both Puccini’s Tosca and Umberto Giordano’s Fedora, as well as in Carmen at Semperoper Dresden. He has played Melot in Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde with the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra and Daniel Harding, as well as with Orchestre de Paris and Christoph Eschenbach. Johansson trained at the Stockholm University College of Opera and has received numerous awards, among them First Prize and the Audience Prize in the Stenhammar competition.

Masetto

Henning von Schulman was a member of the Royal Danish Opera’s ensemble between 2013 and 2017, singing roles including Leporello in Don Giovanni, the title role in Le Nozze di Figaro and Banco in Verdi’s Macbeth. In 2018, he sang Sparafucile in RIgoletto at the Malmö Opera, performed in an acclaimed rendition of Strauss’ Salome at the Salzburger Festspiele conducted by Franz Welser-Möst and the same autumn sang Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 with the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra in Suntory Hall, Tokyo.

Following in the autumn of 2018, he made his debut at the Gothenburg Opera as Fasolt in Das Rheingold where he the year after sang the title role in Le Nozze di Figaro. He is also a frequently engaged Lied and oratorio singer: from Verdi’s Requiem, Stravinsky’s Pulcinella and Handel’s Messiah to Schubert’s Winterreise, Mussorgsky’s Songs and Dances of Death and Jacques Ibert’s Don Quichotte. He has won several awards, including first prize in the Otto Edelmann International Singing Competition in 2013 and the Birgit Nilsson Award in 2017.

Approximate concert length: 5 hours including 2 intervals

Light design Bengt Gomér

Translation Lasse Zilliacus (German to Swedish)