Wang & Salonen

aug.

Monday 19:00

EVENT DATE PASSED

Explosive energy and charm are key when super pianist Yuja Wang and Esa-Pekka Salonen perform together at the Baltic Sea Festival. Stravinsky’s modernist Capriccio for Piano and Orchestra delights the ear at the right pitch to put everyone in a good mood. Prokofiev’s first piano concerto is youthful and virtuoso – pure joy from beginning to end. Sibelius’ orchestral tale about the reckless womanizer Lemminkäinen, known from Finnish mythology, reflects the protagonist’s personality: playful, lovesick and irresistibly spirited, even though a measure of darkness, characteristic of Sibelius, can be detected in the beautifully sombre third movement, The Swan of Tuonela.

The concert is broadcast live on Swedish Radio P2

Participants

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.
Esa-Pekka Salonen, Conductor Laureate

Esa-Pekka Salonen is known the world over as both a composer and a conductor. His restless innovation drives him constantly to reposition classical music in the 21st century. He is currently the Music Director of the San Francisco Symphony, where he works alongside eight Collaborative Partners from a variety of disciplines, ranging from composers to roboticists. He is the Conductor Laureate of three world-renowned orchestras: the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra, where he served as Music Director from 1985 until 1995; the Los Angeles Philharmonic, where he was Music Director from 1992 until 2009; and the Philharmonia Orchestra, where he was Principal Conductor & Artistic Advisor from 2008 until 2021. Salonen also co-founded the annual Baltic Sea Festival, and served as its Artistic Director from 2003 until 2018.

Since joining the San Francisco Symphony, Salonen has worked to expand and embrace the possibilities of the orchestra, looking toward the future of classical music and its audience. Salonen’s 2023/24 season includes world premieres of Jesper Nordin’s violin concerto Convergences with Pekka Kuusisto, Anders Hillborg’s Piano Concerto with Emanuel Ax, and Jens Ibsen’s Drowned in Light, all of them with the San Francisco Symphony.

From 2015 to 2018, Salonen was Composer in Residence at the New York Philharmonic. He was the Berliner Philharmoniker’s Composer in Residence of the 2022/23 season. In October 2023, he led the Los Angeles Philharmonic in the world premiere of a short new work composed in celebration of the 20th anniversary of the Walt Disney Concert Hall. The 2023/24 season also sees Salonen lead his Sinfonia concertante for organ and orchestra with the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra and Philadelphia Orchestra, with Olivier Latry appearing as a soloist with both orchestras.

Esa-Pekka Salonen has received numerous major awards, including the UNESCO Rostrum for the work Floof, the Grawemeyer Award for his Violin Concerto, and the Nemmers Composition Prize. He has been awarded the royal Swedish medal Litteris et Artibus, the Pro Finlandia medal and Commander 1st Class of the Order of the Lion of Finland, and Officier des Arts et des Lettres by the French government. In 2020, he was appointed an honorary Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire.
Yuja Wang, piano

Chinese pianist Yuja Wang is celebrated worldwide for her virtuosity, as well as her spontaneous and lively performances. She famously told the New York Times “I firmly believe every program should have its own life and be a representation of how I feel at the moment”. In January 2023, she played Rachmaninoff’s four piano concertos as well has his Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini in a marathon concert with Yannick Nézet-Séguin and the Philadelphia Orchestra, a renowned concert event commemorating Rachmaninoff’s 150th anniversary. The same season, she gave the world premiere of Magnus Lindberg’s Piano Concerto No. 3 with the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra, and further performances of the work throughout North America and Europe.

Highlights from the 2024/25 season include performing Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 1 and Chopin’s Piano Concerto No. 2 in a massive Europe and Asia tour with Antonio Pappano and the London Symphony Orchestra. She will play a duo recital with Vikingur Ólafsson at the Wiener Musikverein, Elbphilharmonie Hamburg, London Royal Festival Hall and Philharmonie de Paris. In addition, she will play Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1 with Yannick Nézet-Séguin and the Philharmonia Orchestra, and conduct the New York Philharmonic from the piano in works by Janáček, Stravinsky, and Gershwin.

Wang has made numerous critically acclaimed performances and recordings. She was named Musical America’s Artist of the Year in 2017, and in 2021 received an Opus Klassik Award for her world-premiere recording of John Adams’ Must the Devil Have all the Good Tunes? with the Los Angeles Philharmonic and Gustavo Dudamel.
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.

Programme

Concert length: 2 hrs 10 mins with intermission

ANDERS HILLBORG: Fanfare for the Baltic Sea Festival

2 min
IGOR STRAVINSKY: Capriccio for Piano and Orchestra

17 min

After several successful years as a soloist in his own Concerto for Piano and Winds (1924), Igor Stravinsky decided he needed a follow-up. Stylistically, this piece of music turned out to be very different from the first. He started composing it in December 1928 and finished most of it during a stay in Nice the following summer.

Capriccio for Piano and Orchestra (1929) was conceived during his so-called Neo-classical period (c. 1920–1954), and he claimed he found his greatest inspiration in Carl Maria von Weber’s virtuoso piano sonatas. Felix Mendelssohn’s and Piotr Tchaikovsky’s melodious music have also inspired it.

This is a rather peculiar work. The structure is traditional, with three movements, but Stravinsky combines several styles, and he stubbornly rejects all other conventions. It is a technically highly demanding piece for the soloists (apart from the solo piano it includes a concertino group of orchestra soloists); but still, it is so much more than a superficial showpiece.

The three movements are played attacca (without a break). The first begins with an introduction, revealing the contrasting nature of the work in three explosive bars. This “wakeup call” is followed by a silent, poignant phrase in the concertino group. Only after that the movement takes off with a rhythmic theme in the piano’s lower register, which is repeated in dialogue with the orchestra. The introduction material returns towards the end of the movement, this time making the transition into a reflective coda.

The second movement opens with a couple of unconventionally embellished bars in the piano. A toccata-like structure permeates the entire movement, evoking a cimbalom (a traditional Hungarian instrument Stravinsky was particularly fond of). The Hungarian idiom appears to be confirmed when a rhapsodic passage that brings Franz Liszt to mind completes the movement.

Finally, a Parisian theme takes over. The music blinks, smiles and flirts with us, precluding Maurice Ravel’s recipe for a concert, which he claimed ought to be “light and brilliant, not aiming for any kind of deep or dramatic effect”.

Because of its charming, inviting warmth and immediate appeal, the capriccio is now part of the standard repertoire.

Text: Andreas Konvicka
KAIJA SAARIAHO: Lumière et pesanteur

6 min

Kaija Saariaho’s Lumière et pesanteur was composed as a gift to the conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen, inspired by his performance of her La Passion de Simone (2006) in Los Angeles in January 2009. Lumière et pesanteur from the same year is an arrangement based on the eighth movement, which was, according to Saariaho, Salonen’s favourite movement.

Simone in the title is the French Jewish philosopher and social activist Simone Weil (1909–11943), whose life and work is portrayed in the work. Saariaho was deeply influenced by Weil’s writings, her guide from a young age. Each movement is different in character and structure as they focus on moments in Weil’s life and interpret some of her ideas.

The text to Lumière et pesanteur is based on the eighth part of the oratory Dieu se retire pour ne pas être aimé comme un trésor par un avare (God withdraws in order not to be loved like miser loves treasure), a quote from Weil’s posthumously published La pesanteur et la grâce (Gravity and Grace). In it she explores the deeply existential question of the relationship between human suffering and the transcendental realm of spirituality. In Weil’s spiritual vocabulary “gravity” is the evil that the human spirit is capable of, an energy that constantly draws it down. The “grace” is the opposite energy, which alone can bring about the liberation and ascent of the soul.

Saariaho reflects this idea in Lumière et pesanteur, the interaction between lightness and gravity, and allows it to permeate the whole work. From the very first bar the music is rich in texture and tonal coloration, and like many of her orchestral pieces they proceed with small, seemingly constant, subtle shifts. Saariaho creates an ethereal sound with simple means. Restless chords slowly and precisely balance against swaying lines that appear to vanish into a haze. The music is constantly varied and suggestive. Sudden outbursts are followed by fluttering tremolos, contrasted against a cosmic peace.

Text: Andreas Konvicka
SERGEJ PROKOFIEV: Piano Concerto No. 1 in D-flat major

16 min

Sergei Prokofiev’s Piano Concerto No. 1 (1911–1912) is an early work, composed while he was a student at the conservatory in Saint Petersburg. There, he was known as a rebel prone to modernist, provocative experimental music. His teachers often reprimanded him, but they also commended him for his imagination and creativity.

The concert signifies a major leap towards greater, more mature musical forms. It was already stamped with Prokofiev’s hallmark as a modernist, and it showed strong influences from Romantic predecessors such as Sergei Rachmaninov and Franz Liszt. Among the most ground-breaking elements were Prokofiev’s discovery of how to use the piano as percussion, which no one had thought of before. As a precocious, highly accomplished pianist, he was able to make use of these stylistic choices already in his teens.

The piece is an amalgamation of the traditional classical concert – two fast movements framing a slow movement, a continuous, unbroken structure. It opens with an elaborate introduction, in line with the Romantic concert tradition. The soloist plays in unison with the strings, but soon the music changes into something else as the fast, severe, tormented staccato theme emerges. The subdued orchestra supports the piano’s meandering, rhythmic solo parts, which feel playful and mischievous also in the more dramatic passages. It all ends with the return of the main theme.

This is followed by the slow movement, beginning with a dreamy, almost melancholic, intimate passage in the strings. It suggests the lyrical mysticism of the twenty years older Aleksandr Skriabin – a yearning mood with elements of jazz.

Finally, much of the majestic structure from the first movement is repeated. A short introductory piano theme with an energetic response in the orchestra, followed by a melancholic minor passage. Then the hammering chords from the first movement returns and it all erupts a tutti in an upbeat, grandiose finale.

Text: Andreas Konvicka
Intermission

20 min
JEAN SIBELIUS : Lemminkäinen Suite Op. 22

50 min

I. Lemminkäinen and the Maidens of Saari
II. Lemminkäinen in Tuonela
III. The Swan of Tuonela
IV. Return

Jean Sibelius’ Lemminkäinen Suite (1896) is an orchestral suite in E-flat major divided into four parts and based on an unfinished Wagner-inspired opera project, Veneen luominen (The Creation of the Boat). Sibelius borrowed four legends about the hero Lemminkäinen’s adventures from the Finnish national epic Kalevala.

Reviews after the premiere were negative and the Lemminkäinen Suite was not performed in full until 1935. When it was published in 1954 the second and third parts had changed places, which means that The Swan of Tuonela is now played after the first part. In this concert, the suite is performed in the original order.

In the first legend, Lemminkäinen and the Maidens of the Island, our hero escapes to an island where he seduces the entire female population. But, to his own and the girls’ grief, he is forced to escape the husbands’ revenge. A repeated chord in the horns opens the movement like a misty, dreamlike gateway to the Finnish cultural heritage. It soon develops into a free sonata, with playful, folk themes increase in intensity and sensualism as the narrative progresses.

In Lemminkäinen in Tuonela, Lemminkäinen’s mother learns that he has been killed, and she descends into Tuonela (land of the dead). She assembles his scattered body parts and revives him using magic incantations and ointment. Tuonela is described through interlaced, distorted figures pitted against heart-rending cries in the woodwind and brass sections. Sibelius tone paints the central, mystical part, in which the mother recites her spells, with a repetitive, static melody.

The Swan of Tuonela is based on the draft overture to the previously mentioned opera. The famous slow, melancholic A-minor solo in the English horn represents the swan’s monotonous song. To win Pohjala’s daughter’s hand, Lemminkäinen must kill the sacred black swan that swims in the dark underworld river. But before he succeeds, he is killed by a shepherd with a poisoned stalk “through the heart, through the liver”, whereupon he is dismembered and thrown into the river.

Finally, in Lemminkainen’s Return, after his adventures and struggles, the hero returns to his mother. A dizzying ride on horseback that begins like a perpetual movement in C-major erupts in peals of E-flat major chords on his return.

Text: Andreas Konvicka

About the concert

Kaija Saariaho’s Lumière et pesanteur was composed as a gift to the conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen, inspired by his performance of her La Passion de Simone (2006) in Los Angeles in January 2009. Simone in the title is the French Jewish philosopher and social activist Simone Weil (1909–11943), whose life and work is portrayed in the work. Lumière et pesanteur is based on the eighth part of the oratory Dieu se retire pour ne pas être aimé comme un trésor par un avare (God withdraws in order not to be loved like miser loves treasure). Saariaho builds up a subtle mood. The mostly slow, reflective music whirls and breathes in hazy harmonies that linger, swell and overlap.

Stravinsky composed Capriccio for Piano and Orchestra (1929) after his success with Concerto for Piano and Winds (1924). He had moved to Paris to escape the Russian revolution, and he needed to make music to make a living. As the name suggests, Capriccio is a playful piece. The piano leaps and jumps, transporting the listener to a music hall. Stravinsky compared the cimbalom-like cadence in the second movement with “a kind of Romanian restaurant music”.

We get to hear more Russian piano music in Sergei Prokofiev’s Piano Concerto No. 1 in D-flat major from 1911–1912. It is the shortest of the composer’s five complete piano concertos. It only lasts about fifteen minutes, but it is extraordinarily inventive. The first few bars introduce a magnificent, romantic, theme, after which the composer abandons all traditional forms in favour of sparkling great interval leaps and key changes at a furious, energetic pace. This is a very early work in which you can already discern the beginnings of Prokofiev’s personal style.

Jean Sibelius’ Lemminkäinen Suite was originally a draft for a Wagner-inspired opera that would have been called Veneen luominen (The Creation of the Boat), an adventure from the Finnish national epic Kalevala. The composer abandoned the project after a year and rewrote it for the Lemminkäinen orchestral cycle. It consists of four tonal poems based on legends about the heroic character Lemminkäinen, also borrowed from the Kalevala. The popular tonal poem The Swan of Tuonela is frequently performed as a freestanding orchestral work.

Text: Andreas Konvicka

aug.

Monday 19:00

EVENT DATE PASSED

Wang & Salonen

Participants

Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra

Esa-Pekka Salonen, Conductor Laureate

Yuja Wang, piano

Malin Broman, concertmaster

Programme

About the concert