Silent Earth
aug.
27
Saturday 19:00
EVENT DATE PASSED
One of the most urgent issues of our time, the climate crisis, is the topic of Karin Rehnqvist’s Silent Earth for choir and orchestra with texts by Kerstin Perski. Rehnqvist and Perski express the dramatic climate change that threatens the Earth in three emotional movements: Silent Earth; We, Who Once Were; The Burning Earth. Silent Earth was first performed in Amsterdam in January 2022, this is the first performance in Sweden. The concert opens with Tchaikovsky’s musically shimmering Hymn of the Cherubim from the composer’s Liturgy of Saint John Chrysostomos. The concert concludes with Sergei Rachmaninov’s evocative second symphony. The Russian-Finnish conductor Dima Slobodeniouk, musical director of Orquesta Sinfónica de Galicia, conducts the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra and the Swedish Radio Choir.
Participants
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Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra
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.
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Malin Broman, concertmaster
Malin Broman is the first concertmaster of the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra since 2008. She served as artistic director of Musica Vitae in 2015–2020, premiering over 20 works and touring and recording extensively. In 2019, she succeeded Sakari Oramo as artistic director of the Ostrobothnian Chamber Orchestra.
As a guest leader, she has been invited to perform with ensembles such as the London Symphony Orchestra, Mahler Chamber Orchestra and the Philharmonia Orchestra. As combined soloist and leader she has performed with the Tapiola Sinfonietta, Nordic Chamber Orchestra, Trondheim Soloists and ACO Collective. Soloist highlights include performances with the Gothenburg Symphony, Copenhagen Phil, BBC Scottish Symphony, Academy of St Martin-in-the Fields, and the Swedish Radio Orchestra, working with such conductors as Neeme Järvi, Andrew Manze and Daniel Harding.
In recent years, she has premiered concertos by Daniel Börtz, Britta Byström, Andrea Tarrodi and Daniel Nelson. She has recorded over 30 albums, including concertos by Carl Nielsen and Britta Byström. Recent releases include an album with music by Laura Netzel, and Stockholm Diary with the Ostrobothnian Chamber Orchestra. Her recording of Mendelssohn’s double concerto together with pianist Simon Crawford-Phillips and Musica Vitae was Grammy nominated in 2019.
She received much acclaim for her recording of Felix Mendelssohn’s string octet in the spring of 2020, where she played all eight parts herself. She has since made two similar recordings: Britta Byström’s octet A Room of One’s Own, and Johan Halvorsens Passacaglia recorded with the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra’s solo contrabassist Rick Stotijn.
In 2001, she founded the Change Music Festival in Kungsbacka. She is also co-founder of Kungsbacka Piano Trio, with which she had played more than 700 concerts all ove the world, and of Stockholm Syndrome Ensemble which is made up of some of Europe’s most brilliant chamber musicians.
In 2008, Malin was elected a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Music. The Kungsbacka Piano Trio has received the prestigious Interpret Prize of the Royal Academy of Music. In 2019, she was awarded H.M. The King’s Medal. She is currently Professor of Viola at Edsberg Institute of Music in Stockholm. She plays a 1709 Stradivarius violin and a 1861 Bajoni viola, both generously loaned by the Järnåker Foundation.
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Swedish Radio Choir
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.
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Dima Slobodeniouk, conductor
Lauded for his deeply informed and intelligent artistic leadership, Dima Slobodeniouk has held the position of Music Director of the Spanish orchestra Orquesta Sinfónica de Galicia since 2013.
In previous seasons, he has worked with renowned orchestras such as the Berliner Philharmoniker, Symphonieorchester des Bayerischen Rundfunks, Bayrische Staatsorchester, Gewandhausorchester Leipzig, London Philharmonic Orchestra, Concertgebouworkest and the NHK Symphony Orchestra.
Slobodeniouk’s recordings include an album featuring Kalevi Aho’s Siedi and his Fifth Symphony, the concert suites of Sergei Prokofiev’s opera The Gambler and the ballet The Tale of the Stone Flower with the Lahti Symphony Orchestra on BIS. Also previously released by BIS were works by Stravinsky with the Orquesta Sinfónica de Galicia and Ilya Gringolts, plus another recording of works by composer Kalevi Aho with the Lahti Symphony Orchestra, which won the 2018 BBC Music Magazine Award. For the Ondine label, Dima Slobodeniouk recorded works by Perttu Haapanen and Lotta Wennäkoski with the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra.
From 2016 to 2021, Dima Slobodeniouk was Principal Conductor of the Lahti Symphony Orchestra as well as Artistic Director of the Sibelius Festival.
Programme
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PYOTR TJAIKOVSKY: Hymn of the Cherubim, 9 min
The Hymn of the Cherubim from the Liturgy of St John Chrysostom, Opus 41, is a spiritual a capella choral work completed by Tchaikovsky in 1878. He had discovered and been inspired by the music of the Orthodox Church, and he wrote to a friend: “A vast and untrodden field of activity lies open to composers here … In my opinion, the Liturgy of St John Chrysostom is one of the greatest artistic achievements of all time … it is impossible not to be deeply moved by it.”
The divine Liturgy of St John Chrysostom is a central communion service liturgy of the Orthodox Church. The anaphora – the key repetitive element of the text – is attributed to St John Chrysostom, Archbishop of Constantinople in the sixth century. Tchaikovsky’s composition is considered to be the first musically coherent composition of the liturgical text. Most of the fifteen movements are based on traditional, simple, homophone Slavonic songs. But Tchaikovsky introduced new, less formal compositions to six of the movements. These are less “sugary” than the prevailing ideal at the time in that they are more informed by early Italian sacred music by, for example, Allegri and Vivaldi. The Hymn of the Cherubim – allegedly inspired by a personal, religious experience in childhood – is the work’s finest achievement.
The clerics of the Russian-Orthodox Church were quick to censor and ban new musical versions of the holy texts that were not to their liking; much of Tchaikovsky’s liturgical music was confiscated by the director of the St Petersburg State Academic Chapel. Composing and playing the music in private was permitted, but publication was strictly forbidden. By sending the work to his editor, Pyotr Jurgenson, Tchaikovsky’s unknowingly started a small revolution. Jurgenson entered a lengthy legal combat that was eventually won by the composer, and the music was published. This groundbreaking victory allowed other Russian composers such as Rimsky-Korsakov and Rachmaninov to create their music without bureaucratic intervention.
Text: Andreas Konvicka
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KARIN REHNQVIST: Silent Earth, Swedish premiere, 30 min
One evening in March 2019, Kerstin and I sat talking about us human beings and the Earth. Our planet Earth, being increasingly exposed. Vulnerable. The ice is melting, the forests are aflame, our rivers and streams are overflowing in a way that we haven’t seen before. The proportions are frightening. What will happen? What is happening right now?
In our thoughts, we transported ourselves to another planet. We sat there and gazed from a distance at our beautiful blue planet. The Earth. So beautifully suspended in space. Yes, there it is. But what do we find there? Could there be life? Are there people? We chatted for a long while and somehow it felt consoling that we nevertheless sat there philosophizing, albeit on another planet. We existed. We were alive.
I was about to begin composing a large-scale piece for choir and orchestra; I was looking for ideas and felt that it was impossible not to touch upon the climate crisis, that fateful issue for humanity. With my voice and a piano I had improvised a free introduction that I gave to Kerstin.
After our conversation, she returned with two short, exquisite poems. The third poem had already been completed. It was written in 2008 and is a very dramatic text about a natural disaster. Even though it was written first, I decided that it should be placed last in the piece. Then I started to compose and, as always, I was carried away with the music. After a long phase of coalescing it gradually becomes clear and begins to take form.
My starting point is always that I examine something with the help of music. I try to hear what needs to be said, what needs to be expressed. It becomes a conversation with the notes, in which I set in motion processes keenly alive to where the music wants to go. I work at it, play it over and over, knead, sing, dream the music forth. If it is inspired, it opens up and starts to compose itself. Things arise that I never would have been able to hit upon by thinking. You have to pay attention, have your feelers up.
The first movement is desolate with wind gongs, cymbals and icy brass. In the midst of this: the choir, Humanity.
In the second movement, the choir – we humans – sing to the Earth. Telling who we were. How we lived. The sonorities are often in unison, having the simplicity of a song. At times almost romantic. Actually, when listening to a recent playback I thought it was a little too romantic, too beautiful. As an artist, I then began to paint over the movement with trills, sometimes harmonious, sometimes discordant. Now and then I made the music come to a halt, freeze. The movement concludes with the choir singing in many different languages to the Earth: Save yourself from us! Save us from ourselves! Save us!
The last movement is quite dramatic, a depiction of a natural disaster and a lament combined: The burning earth. The tremoring earth … The piece is rounded off by an extended coda.
Text: Karin Rehnqvist
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Sergei Rachmaninov: Symphony no 2 E minor
“When I had completed the second, and then revised the first, I assure you: no more symphonies. Damn them! I don’t know how to write them, and above all, I don’t want to,” Sergei Rachmaninov wrote to his friend Nikita Morozov in the winter of 1907. It still tormented him ten years after the disastrous first performance of his first symphony. This was no surprise, as the acerbic critic César Cui compared it something composed by a student at the conservatory of hell, inspired by the ten Plagues of Egypt.
Rachmaninov moved with his family to Dresden in November 1906, partly to escape the effects of the first Russian Revolution, partly to work in peace. He had already started working on his second symphony, but although he was no longer affected by writer’s block he was still haunted by the events of 1897, and progress was slow. It did not help that one of his friends leaked information about the new symphony to the St Petersburg press. As a result, the far from completed work was booked for the coming season. However, this time it was a resounding success, and the papers named Rachmaninov a worthy successor to Tchaikovsky, his favourite composer. He could not have wished for a better response.
The symphony’s first movement is almost programmatic, with a theme that runs through the four movements. The dramatic first movement follows a slow, mysterious introduction. The second movement takes over from the first in the same agitated spirit. A new theme, reminiscent of a medieval Dies Irae, runs through the second movement. After several musical turns, the second movement ends in an eruption that slowly fades out. The poetic, languorous third movement takes over from the dramatic second movement in the form of two wonderful, distinct melodies in succession: one played by the violins, the other by the clarinet. There are also fragments of the introductory theme from the first movement and the Dies Irae element from the second movement. The fourth and final movement, like the first, is in the form of a sonata. A lively, fanfare-like introductory theme is followed by a magnificent, sweeping second theme. Motifs and material from the first three movements are expertly interwoven in the mid-section, and at the end the grandiose and the fanfare-like come together in a triumphant finale.
Text: David Saulesco
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Approximate concert length: 2 hours (with intermission)