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THIS CONCERT HAS BEEN CANCELED - Pictures at an Exhibition

This year’s edition of the Baltic Sea Festival has been cancelled. Read more at balticseafestival.com

Karin Rehnqvist paints an altogether contemporary portrait of our planet and gives a voice – painful and urgent – to our beautiful but tortured world. And then, Mussorgsky’s classic piano suite in Ravel’s equally classic 1922 orchestral arrangement provides an opportunity for self-reflection.

“It is difficult not to touch upon the vulnerable condition of our planet, so this is my commentary, or rather my investigation. Music is my truth-teller to whom I pose my questions. The answers are not always easy to interpret. They may be multifaceted, just like life.” That is how Karin Rehnqvist describes her choral and orchestral work Silent Earth, co-commissioned by the Eduard van Beinum Foundation for Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw and the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra, performed here for the first time in Sweden.

Our own twenties have only just begun. How will we look back at them? Will this be the era when we succeed in sharing and spreading our commitment and our empathy? Will this be the time when we unite around solutions to humanity’s shared challenges?

Silent Earth is a collaboration with the librettist, playwright and author Kerstin Perski, a result of improvisations and shared fantasizing. Together, they have already created the children’s opera Beauty School, the orchestral fairy tale When the Earth Sings and the all-evening opera Stranded.

“One night, we imagined ourselves sitting on another planet, from where we could see our own beautiful Earth from a distance. Both of us have serious concerns about the current crisis, regarding both the climate and the politics surrounding the issue. This is a matter of our world’s destiny”, Karin Rehnqvist tells us.

The first movement of Silent Earth is desolate. Towards the end of the second movement, the choir cries out in despair: “Save yourself from us! Save us from ourselves!” Karin Rehnqvist argues that music, by giving us a deeper understanding of life and what it means to be human, can help us to grieve as well as to rejoice.

“There was, strangely enough, something comforting about sitting there, on another planet, even if it was only in our imagination. We are living in grave times, where artists also need to do their part. Even though the theme is terrifying, composing must always be joyous; otherwise, the music will not come alive. It was wonderful to gradually open yourself up to the sounds that emerged, even if, during the process, the force of the expression sometimes frightened me.”

In a different twenties – les années folles, “the crazy years” in Paris, the capital of art – Maurice Ravel took the barely fifty-year-old piano suite Pictures at an Exhibition and made it his own. He created a loving, and very French orchestration of the Russian masterpiece by the tousled and unruly Modest Mussorgsky.

“Art is not an end in itself, but a means of addressing humanity”, Musorgsky said, not unlike Karin Rehnqvist. He leads us through several rooms of paintings belonging to a recently deceased friend, speaking to us through the bickering women at the market in Limoges, the laughter of children in the Tuileries Garden and in the darkness of the crypt.

We look back at 1870s Russia through 1920s Parisian glasses, and regard the 1920s through a 2020s prism. Today, we remember the 1920s as a decade of optimism, glamour and democratization. But what kind of world did Ravel the impressionist see when he so imaginatively added colour to Mussorgsky’s piano music? And what art will accompany us into the 2020s?

Text: Janna Vettergren


SWEDISH RADIO SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA dot SWEDISH RADIO CHOIR dot 2020/2021
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Participants

 

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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.

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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.

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.

Approximate concert length: 1 h 30 min (with intermission)