Violinist Alina Ibragimova is known for her honest, direct relationship with both the pieces she performs and her audiences. Béla Bártok's Violin Concerto No. 1 is an expressive still image of a young composer in love who has just discovered the treasure trove of Hungarian folk songs on which to form his own tone language.
Eva Ollikainen
Eva Ollikainen is since 2020 the Artistic Leader and Chief Conductor of the Iceland Symphony Orchestra. Her recent guest appearances include concerts and performances with Staatskapelle Dresden, Wiener Symphoniker, BBC Symphony Orchestra, Royal Scottish National Orchestra, Royal Danish Orchestra and Kennedy Center Opera House Orchestra.
One of the highlights this season was her debut at the Proms with the BBC Philharmonic, featuring the world premiere of Anna Thorvaldsdóttir’s Archora. She has also made her debut with the Los Angeles Philharmonic both at Walt Disney Hall and Hollywood Bowl and will perform with the BBC Symphony Orchestra at the Festival Printemps des Arts in Monte Carlo. This season she will also visit Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, National Arts Centre Orchestra in Canada and Orchestre National de Belgique. Apart from an extensive tour in the UK with the Iceland Symphony Orchestra she has also conducted the centenary celebration concert of the BBC Philharmonic.
Alina Ibragimova
Performing music from baroque to new commissions on both modern and period instruments, Alina Ibragimova has established a reputation for versatility and the “immediacy and honesty” (The Guardian) of her performances.
The 2022–23 season sees Ibragimova perform concertos by Jörg Widmann, Bartók, Prokofiev and Mendelssohn with the Budapest Festival Orchestra, Pittsburgh Symphony, San Francisco Symphony (all with Robin Ticciati), London Philharmonic (with Edward Gardner), Dresden Philharmonic and Cologne’s Gürzenich-Orchester. She also begins a two-year Mozart cycle with Kammerorchester Basel and Kristian Bezuidenhout.
Last season’s highlights included returns to the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, London Symphony, Philharmonia Orchestra and Mahler Chamber Orchestra.
In recital, Ibragimova regularly performs at London’s Wigmore Hall and Southbank.
https://www.alinaibragimova.com/
Witold Lutosławski: Symphony No. 4
The works of Polish composer Witold Lutosławski (1913–1994) roughly fall into four periods, each marked by a symphony: neoclassical, 12-tone and folk-based, experimental and final. The fourth symphony was his last large-scale work. While serving on the one hand as a textbook example of a two-movement format, it is more in the nature of a single dramatic span.
Of the symphony as a genre he said: “My concept is based on the assumption that the first movement is a preparation for the main one. The first movement should attract the listener's interest, intrigue him. It may not give him full satisfaction, though. It must make him hungry and, finally, even impatient. And that is the right moment to present the main movement. Such is my concept and I think it works quite well in practice.”
The main movement of Symphony No. 4 (1992) is in three sections, the first with flowing string motifs, the second descending from tinkling heights to fanfares on the trombones, and the third developing into a blanketing unison. Even now the listener is left somewhat impatient for more, until the coda brings the work to a resounding, satisfying conclusion.
Béla Bartók: Violin Concerto no. 1, Op. posth.
In May 1907, Béla Bartók happened to meet an old violinist acquaintance, Stefi Geyer. He fell head-over-heels in love with her and drafted a violin concerto especially for her. It was to have been in three movements, each one showing her in a different light: heavenly intimate, amusing and clever, and finally cold and silent. He was heartbroken when she sent it back by return of post, with a parting letter. Battling with thoughts of suicide, he nevertheless finished the score and sent off the manuscript with an inscription that summarises the concerto’s history and nature: “My confession – for Stefi – from the times that were still happy. Although it was only half-happiness.” It is difficult to listen to this now two-movement concerto without thinking about its genesis.
The concerto lay hidden in Geyer’s drawer until 1958, when Hans-Heinz Schneeberger premiered it in Basel. In other words, Bartók never actually heard it – or even admitted that it existed.
Anna Thorvaldsdottir: Archora
Anna Thorvaldsdottir (b. 1977) has, together with Daníel Bjarnason, created a Nordic and Icelandic sound world distinct from that of more southerly Europe. Archora was premiered at the BBC Proms in 2022. The core inspiration behind it is, she says, “the notion of a primordial energy and the idea of an omnipresent parallel realm – a world both familiar and strange, static and transforming, nowhere and everywhere at the same time. The piece revolves around the extremes on the spectrum between the Primordia and its resulting afterglow – and the conflict between these elements that are nevertheless fundamentally one and the same. The halo emerges from the Primordia but they have both lost perspective and the connection to one another, experiencing themselves individually as opposing forces rather than one and the same.
“As with my music generally, the inspiration is not something I am trying to describe through the music as such – it is a way to intuitively approach and work with the core energy, structure, atmosphere and material of the piece.”
Jean Sibelius: Pohjola’s Daughter
Pohjola’s Daughter (1906) is a symphonic poem by Jean Sibelius (1865–1957). It tells in music the story of a character from the Finnish national epic, The Kalevala, and her encounter with a wise old man called Väinämöinen who, while riding a sleigh through the dusky landscape, spots the beautiful girl sitting on a rainbow weaving a cloth of gold. He asks her to join him, but she replies that she will only leave with a man who can pass a number of challenging tests, such as tying an egg into invisible knots and building a boat from fragments of her distaff. Väinämöinen attempts to do all she asks, and in some he is successful, but he fails to build the boat and injures himself with an axe. He gives up, abandons the tests he has been set and continues his journey alone.
Sibelius originally planned to name the poem Väinämöinen, but was persuaded by the publisher to change the perspective to Daughter of the North or, in its usual English translation, Pohjola’s Daughter.
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