John, Jean, Johannes

John Storgårds 

Chief Conductor of the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra and Principal Guest Conductor of Canada’s National Arts Centre Orchestra Ottawa, John Storgårds has a dual career as a conductor and violin virtuoso and is widely recognised for his creative flair for programming as well as his rousing yet refined performances. As Artistic Director of the Lapland Chamber Orchestra, a title he has been holding for over 25 years, Storgårds earned global critical acclaim for the ensemble’s adventurous performances and award-winning recordings.

Storgårds appears with such orchestras as Berliner Philharmoniker, Bamberger Symphoniker, Gewandhausorchester Leipzig, Münchner Philharmoniker, Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Berlin, ORF Radio-Symphonieorchester Wien, Netherlands Philharmonic Orchestra, Orchestre National de France, Orchestra Sinfonica Nationale della RAI, BBC Symphony Orchestra and London Philharmonic Orchestra as well as all major Nordic orchestras including the Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra, where he was Chief Conductor from 2008 to 2015. 

Further afield, he appears with Sydney, Melbourne, Yomiuri Nippon and NHK Symphony Orchestras as well as Boston Symphony Orchestra, Chicago Symphony Orchestra, The Cleveland Orchestra, New York Philharmonic and Detroit Symphony Orchestra. 

John Storgårds (johnstorgards.com)
 

Frode Haltli

Frode Haltli (b. 1975) is a Norwegian accordionist and composer. Haltli began playing the accordion at the age of seven. As a child he played folk music and quickly transitioned to classical and contemporary music. Haltli has directed his career into exploring new music, and also plays music rooted in Norwegian traditions. 

Frode Haltli studied at the Norwegian Academy of Music in Oslo and at the Royal Danish Music Conservatory in Copenhagen, graduating from the Soloist Class in 2000. In 2001 the Norwegian Concert Institute named him ’Young Soloist of the Year’. Haltli is a multiple competition winner.

Haltli has performed in concerts throughout Europe as well as in the USA, Canada and Asia. He has developed transcultural music projects in India, China, Japan, North Korea, and Egypt. Haltli collaborates with composers and orchestras internationally.

Frode Haltli has held master classes at European music academies and at a number of festivals. From 2011 to 2017 he was teaching accordion at the Norwegian Academy of Music, and is now a full-time freelance musician and composer.

Frode Haltli


Jean Sibelius: Aallottaret, Op. 73

Judging from the comments at the first rehearsal of Aallottaret (The Oceanides), the players were completely baffled, but by the time they had been through it three times, they were convinced of its beauty. Its composer, Jean Sibelius (1865–1957), had received a commission for an orchestral work from the Norfolk Music Festival in the United States and duly obliged with a piece entitled Rondo der Wellen (Rondo of the Waves) in 1914. Not satisfied, he nevertheless revised it and renamed it Aallottaret, which literally means “nymphs of the waves”. The concert at which it was premiered, and at which Sibelius also conducted his Finlandia and Valse triste, was a tremendous success.

Aallottaret is in two movements and is very impressionistic, but it is more firmly anchored on tonality than the works of, say, Debussy. It conjures forth an image of the mighty, endless forces of nature, building up to a crashing wave before the sea calms down again in the final bars.

Bent Sørensen: It is pain flowing down slowly on a white wall

Says Danish composer and Grawemeyer Award winner Bent Sørensen (b. 1958) of today’s work: “The sentence – the title – was given to me by a Hungarian woman in August 2008. She put a note with the sentence in my hand after a festival and told me that my music reminded her of the sentence, written by a Hungarian poet. It is music full of slow motion – of sorrow – full of tangos with no dancers. Maybe I imagined the tears of an accordion player flowing down slowly on the bellow of the instrument.” The story has an epilogue. Three years after the premiere, Sørensen met the lady again. She had, she said, misremembered the colour: it was red, not white.

The piece has a violin solo end, performed outside the hall, and just before the end the violins and violas leave the stage. Sørensen was inspired by literature and nature, childhood memories and dreams, and he may be regarded as a romantic artist, though his music does not necessarily sound romantic in the traditional sense.
 

Jean Sibelius: Night Ride and Sunrise, Op. 55

While writing Night Ride and Sunrise, Jean Sibelius was suffering from ill health, and the possibility of death seems to have influenced some of his works. Night Ride never became as popular as some of his other tone poems, such as En Saga, Pohjola’s Daughter or the Lemminkäinen Legends. It is an introverted, bleak work marked by the manic repetition of short motifs and gradual transformation in a way that is almost minimalist. The reception at the premiere in St. Petersburg in 1909 was only lukewarm, and Sibelius was hardly consoled by the fact that the conductor (Siloti) had meddled with it, though his Russian colleague Glazunov was most enthusiastic. But as Sibelius told his English biographer, it portrayed “the inner experiences of an average man riding alone through the forest gloom, sometimes glad to be alone with Nature, sometimes awe-struck by the stillness or the strange sounds which break it, but thankful and rejoicing in the daybreak.”
 

Johannes Brahms: Symphony No. 3 in F

For Johannes Brahms (1833–1897), the symphony, and above all the symphonies of Beethoven, represented the height of perfection in terms of form and classical beauty. He was so daunted by his “giant” predecessor that he was hesitant about trying his hand at the genre, and it is rather ironic that his first symphony was dubbed “Beethoven’s Tenth”, his second “The Pastoral” and his third “Brahms’s Eroica”! The Brahms and Beethoven symphonies nevertheless have virtually nothing in common.

The third is the shortest and most compact of the four Brahms symphonies. The whole work is, as it were, summarised in the first four bars: the motto F–A-flat–F (frei aber froh – free but happy) followed by a quotation from Schumann’s own third symphony, the Rhenish. Brahms then develops his motto in a superb demonstration of development technique lasting around half an hour and causing Clara Schumann to exclaim that the whole symphony was like “one beat of the heart”.

The most striking feature of the symphony is the juxtaposition of major and minor. The second and third movements are lyrical interludes before the impassioned finale in which sharp-eared listeners may catch echoes of Beethoven’s most famous theme. The movements all die away at the end – something no one, not even Beethoven, had ever tried before.