Spalding & Chase

Susanna Mälkki

Chief Conductor of the Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra since 2016 and Principal Guest Conductor of the Los Angeles Philharmonic since 2017, Susanna Mälkki is a regular guest with the world’s most illustrious orchestras and at such opera houses as La Scala, the New York Metropolitan and the Vienna State Opera. From 2006 to 2013 she was Artistic Director of the Ensemble Intercontemporain in Paris on the invitation of Pierre Boulez and has conducted the premieres of works by many of the greatest contemporary composers. Beginning her career as a cellist and winning the Turku Cello Competition in 1994, she spent three years as principal cello in the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra. Susanna Mälkki is a Chevalier of the Légion d’honneur in France, a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Music in London and a member of the Kungliga Musikaliska Akademien in Stockholm.
www.susannamalkki.com

Claire Chase

Claire Chase is a real dynamo: soloist, collaborative artist, curator and advocate for new and experimental music, forever taking on new projects. Co-artistic director of Ensemble Evolution, an intensive workshop for emerging talents, she was named Professor of the Practice in the Department of Music at Harvard University starting in 2017. She has championed new music throughout the world by building organisations, forming alliances, pioneering commissioning initiatives and supporting educational programmes and was awarded the Avery Fisher Prize in 2017. In 2001, she founded the International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE) that, from struggling along on a shoestring budget, became what The New Yorker described as the United States’ “foremost new-music ensemble”. She has premiered over 100 works. One of them, Felipe Lara’s Meditation and Calligraphy, was part of Density 2036, a 23-year commissioning project due to create an entirely new body of repertoire for flute between 2014 and 2036. In 2036, the centenary of Edgard Varèse’s ground-breaking 1936 flute solo, Density 21.5, she will play a 24-hour marathon of all of the repertoire created in the project.

Esperanza Spalding

In 2011, Esperanza Spalding was the first jazz singer to win a Grammy for Best New Artist. She has since also won a Grammy for Best Jazz Vocal Album (2013, 2020) and Best Arrangement, Instruments and Vocals (2013). Raised in Portland, Oregon, she was a veritable child prodigy, teaching herself to play the violin and rising to the position of leader in her local orchestra. She then adding oboe, clarinet and guitar to her range of instruments. But from the moment she began appearing at blues clubs and in bands, bass became an inseparable part of her. At the age of 20, she was the youngest teacher to graduate from the Berklee School of Music in Boston. Since 2006, she has released eight albums. In 2017, she did Exposure, her sixth studio album – everything from lyrics and music to recording in a mere 77 hours, streaming the whole creative process live on Facebook. The 7,777 limited edition copies of the album were sold even before the recording was complete. In 2017, Esperanza Balding was appointed Professor of the Practice of Music at Harvard University.

Follow Esperanza Spalding on Twitter @EspeSpalding 

Antonín Dvořák: Slavonic Dances, Op. 46

Antonín Dvořák (1841–1904) originally wrote his eight Slavonic Dances, Op. 46 for two pianos four hands in 1878. The idea came from the publisher Fritz Simrock, who had noted the popularity of the Hungarian Dances by Brahms and decided to strike while the iron was hot. He was not disappointed; Europe was caught up in a wave of nationalism and with it nationalist music, and there was a great demand for music for amateur pianists to play. In order to boost sales even further, Simrock quickly commissioned versions of Dvořák’s Dances for large orchestra. These were an immediate hit and so Simrock asked Dvořák to write a further eight. Despite their name, they are Slavonic only in mood and temperament, and listeners will search in vain for genuine folk melodies. They do, however, feature rhythms associated with specific regions: seven of them Dvořák’s native Bohemia and one, “Dumka” (no. 2), probably Serbia.

Nro 1 C-duuri: Furiant (Presto)
Nro 2 e-molli: Dumka (Allegretto scherzando)
Nro 3 As-duuri: Polka (Poco allegro)
Nro 4 F-duuri: Sousedská (Tempo di menuetto)
Nro 5 A-duuri: Skočná (Allegro vivace)
Nro 6 D-duuri: Sousedská (Allegretto scherzando)
Nro 7 c-molli: Skočná (Allegro assai)
Nro 8 g-molli: Furiant (Presto)

Felipe Lara: Double Concerto

The ultimate goal of his Double Concerto is, says Felipe Lara, to (re)interpret the orchestral double concerto genre in the form of a performer-specific work exploring aspects of oral, improvisational, written and electroacoustic musical traditions. This approach highlights the role of the soloists as unique interpreters from different stylistic backgrounds (song, jazz/experimental, symphonic). Another unique feature is the use of the voice in the typically instrumental concerto setting. Lara uses texts in Portuguese, vocalises, as well as noisy vocal utterances – phonemes, consonants, and modulations caused by vocal/instrumental simultaneities.

Born in São Paulo in 1979, Felipe Lara composed his Double Concerto as a joint commission from the HPO and the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra. The two soloists, Claire Chase and Esperanza Spalding, both contributed to the composition process, experimenting with and exploring unconventional performance methods, choosing and processing recordings in a highly collaborative, intimate and distinctive creative effort.