To New Worlds

Missy Mazzoli: Sinfonia (for Orbiting Spheres)

Missy Mazzoli (b. 1980) is one of the most highly-acclaimed US composers of her generation. She has written opera, orchestral, chamber and vocal music, and she is also well known for her role in festivals and projects and her electroacoustic ensemble Victoire in which she plays keyboards. Commissioned by the Los Angeles Philharmonic and premiered in 2014, Sinfonia (for Orbiting Spheres) is, she says, “music in the shape of a solar system, a collection of Rococo loops that twist around each other within a larger orbit. The word ’sinfonia’ refers to Baroque works for chamber orchestra but also to the old Italian term for a hurdy-gurdy, a medieval stringed instrument with constant, wheezing drones that are cranked out under melodies played on an attached keyboard. It’s a piece that churns and roils, that inches close to the listener only to leap away at breakneck speed, in the process transforming the ensemble turns into a makeshift hurdy-gurdy, flung recklessly into space.”

Samy Moussa: Concerto for Violin and Orchestra “Adrano”

Samy Moussa (b. 1984) is this season’s HPO composer-in-residence. A Canadian now living in Berlin, he has written various works for soloist and orchestra. One of these is the concerto for violin and orchestra ‘Adrano’ (2019) that won him the Canadian Juno Classical Composition of the Year  Award in 2021. It is in four short movements, the first three performed without a break. While writing the concerto, Moussa visited Sicily and the town of Adrano founded in about 400 BC and named after an ancient fire god, Adranus, who was said to have lived under Mount Etna. Mousa was greatly inspired by this mythological subject. In the opening movement, the god gradually wakes up deep in the earth. The second is somewhat in the nature of a cadenza, and the flames erupt in the third. The finale is an epilogue and returns to the mood of the beginning. Tonight’s is the concerto’s first performance in Finland.

John Corigliano: The Red Violin: Chaconne

John Corigliano, an American composer born in 1938, was awarded an Oscar for his score for the film The Red Violin (1998) telling the story of a violin built in 18th-century Cremona. “The film,” he says, “spans three centuries in the life of a magnificent but haunted violin in its travels through space and time. A story this episodic needed to be tied together with a single musical idea. For this purpose, I used the Baroque device of a chaconne: a repeated pattern of chords upon which the music is built. Against the chaconne chords I juxtaposed a lyrical yet intense melody representing the violin builder's doomed wife. From these elements I wove a series of virtuosic etudes for the solo violin, which followed the instrument from country to country, century to century. While I scored the film just for the soloist and string orchestra (to emphasize the ‘stringness’ of the picture), I composed this seventeen-minute concert work for violin and full orchestra.”

Antonín Dvořák: Symphony No. 9 in E Minor, Op. 95 “From the New World”

In September 1892, Antonín Dvořák (1841–1904) arrived in the United States to take up his post as director of the New York National Conservatory. He liked the work, but was homesick, and in spring 1895 returned to Europe. His American years were nevertheless highly productive, and included the Symphony in E Minor of 1893. In a letter to his publisher he wrote: “The success of the symphony was spectacular; the papers are saying that no composer has ever achieved a triumph such as this. People applauded for so long that I had to express my appreciation like a king.” Greatly inspired by the songs and dances of the indigenous people and African Americans, Dvořák sought to capture something of their spirit in his symphony. The melody of the slow movement is, however, often regarded as an authentic spiritual, though it did not acquire words until later. It has also been claimed that some of the motifs were inspired by Longfellow’s epic Song of Hiawatha, but according to Leonard Bernstein, the symphony was composed by an Old World composer firmly rooted in the European tradition and the soundscapes of his native Bohemia.

Elina Vähälä 

Elina Vähälä (born 1975) is one of Finland’s most renowned violinists on the international stage. The Chicago Tribune described her as ’a fluent, stylish and gifted musician whose brilliant technique is matched by an abundant spirit, sensitivity and imagination’. 

Together with the Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra, Vähälä performs the Finnish premiere of the violin concerto Adrano by Samy Moussa, the orchestra’s Composer-in-Residence. Earlier in the 2024–2025 season, she premiered two violin concertos by Finnish composers: Cecilia Damström’s Earth Songs in September and Olli Mustonen’s Violin Concerto No. 2 on Finland’s Independence Day in December.

Elina Vähälä began learning the violin at the age of three and made her orchestral debut at twelve. A graduate of the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki, she is a professor at the Universität für Musik und Darstellende Kunst in Vienna, having previously been a professor at the Hochschule für Musik in Karlsruhe, Germany. Vähälä is Artistic Director of the Naantali Music Festival in Finland.

Dalia Stasevska

Dalia Stasevska (born 1984) has established herself as one of Finland’s internationally recognised conductors. She is Chief Conductor of the Lahti Symphony Orchestra and Principal Guest Conductor of the BBC Symphony Orchestra.

In the 2024–2025 season, Stasevska appears as a guest conductor with Orchestre de Paris, Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia, the Oslo Philharmonic, the Dresdner Philharmonie, the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra, the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic, the Helsinki Philharmonic, and the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra. In North America, she debuts with the New World Symphony and returns to several orchestras, including the Philadelphia Orchestra, the San Francisco Symphony, and Orchestre symphonique de Montréal.

Stasevska studied conducting at the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki, where her teachers included Jorma Panula and Leif Segerstam. She was awarded the Ukrainian Order of Princess Olga (III degree) by President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in October 2021. Since February 2022, she has been actively supporting Ukraine through fundraising and aid delivery.