Harding meets Alina Ibragimova
In the run-up to the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra’s large European tour, they invite us to three days of concerts, with particular focus on the amazing soloists that will accompany them. Alina Ibragimova is celebrated for her disarming musicality and her varied career. This time, she performs Robert Schumann’s classic Violin Concerto, which after decades of disrepute is now rightly considered to be one of the composer’s most important works. The programme also includes Allan Pettersson’s Symphonic Movement as well as a suite from Berlioz’s dramatic choral symphony, Romeo and Juliet.
Today, Allan Pettersson is one of our most internationally renowned composers. He grew up in poverty and lived most of his life in Södermalm in Stockholm. In his enormous body of work, including 17 symphonies, the 1973 work with the crass title Symphonic Movement assumes a modest position. The piece was written after the eleventh symphony and was commissioned by Swedish Television for a nature film by journalist and film maker Boris Ersson, with the intention that the music and images would create a unity. Ersson had already made a name for himself by setting images to the final section of Petterson’s seventh symphony, which for many years was the wintry New Year’s vignette for a large TV audience. In the barely 400-bar score to Symphonic Movement, Pettersson has set a playing time of 11 minutes. The piece begins with a twelve-tone series, a technique he studied in Paris in the 1950s, where the last note via a major cord transitions into less serial progressions of notes.
Few works have had such a strange fate as Robert Schumann’s Violin Concerto in D Minor. After having been forgotten for over eighty years, it was adopted by the Nazis as an “Aryan” alternative to Mendelssohn’s violin concerto, which had been banned, and was performed by Georg Kulenkampf in Berlin in November 1937. A month later, the concerto was performed in the United States by Jewish violinist Yehudi Menuhin, who called it the “link between Beethoven’s and Brahms’ violin concertos”. The concerto was Schumann’s final orchestral work and was written in the autumn of 1853 for violinist Joseph Joachim, who he met when visiting Mendelssohn in 1843. Despite a successful initial collaboration around Schumann’s Fantasy for Violin and Orchestra in September 1853, the work on the violin concerto came to nothing. The concerto was thought to show signs of Schumann’s increasing mental illness and after his death it faded into obscurity. Nowadays, the concerto is incorporated into the standing repertoire and Alina Ibragimova is very fond of the work. ”It is an extremely complex work” she says. “I often get very tired from playing Schumann’s music. There is so much emotion and you have to fill every single note with everything you have.”
Frenchman Hector Berlioz, belonged in several respects to the more wilful romantics. Some of his great vocal works cross genres and are difficult to classify with traditional measures. This includes The Damnation of Faust, a ‘dramatic legend’ that is not infrequently performed on stage, but also the ‘dramatic symphony’ Romeo and Juliet from 1839. The latter work is divided into seven movements and consists of a series of instrumental and vocal ensembles and solo numbers. The vocal passages comment on the events in the loosely connected scenes from Shakespeare’s drama. This is a suite from Romeo and Juliet, performed with the vocal elements left out.
Text: Henry Larsson
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.
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.
Concert length: 2 h 10 min incl. intermission
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