On 25 and 26 August Valery Gergiev will be conducting the Mariinsky Orchestra at the Baltic Sea Festival. Traditionally, the festival’s concerts are held at Stockholm’s Berwaldhallen, built in 1979 and named after the 19th century Swedish Composer Franz Adolf Berwald. The unusual hexagonal shape of the hall accommodates up to one thousand three hundred people and is famed for its exceptional acoustics.
The festival was established in 2003 by Michael Tydén, current head of the festival and former director of the hall, and the conductors Valery Gergiev and Esa-Pekka Salonen. One of the music forum’s aims is to initiate discussion about difficult matters concerning the ecology of the Baltic region. Alongside the music programme there are exhibitions and seminars that focus on environmental problems.
The festival runs on an annual basis in the last week of summer. This year’s festival opens on 24 August with a performance by the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra conducted by Kent Nagano. This evening programme will feature music by two Scandinavian classics – Jean Sibelius and Carl Nielsen, the one hundred and fiftieth birth of both of them being widely celebrated this year. On 29 August it will be possible to hear all four symphonies of Arvo Pärt; the Wrocław Philharmonic Orchestra will mark dedicate its performance to the composer’s eightieth birthday. There will be an unusual programme prepared by the singer Matilda Paulsson and the Swedish Wind Ensemble directed by Hans Ek. The tribute concert titled Desperate Housewives features works by female composers and music-writers including Alma Mahler, Clara Schumann, Julia Wolfe, Rebecca Clarke and Björk.
The Mariinsky Orchestra will be performing twice at the festival – and on both occasions will appear with works by Tchaikovsky. On 25 August these pieces will be performed by prize-winners of the recently-concluded Tchaikovsky Competition – pianist Dmitry Masleyev (1st prize), cellist Alexandre Bouzlov (3rd prize) and violinist Pavel Milyukov (3rd prize). The organisers have titled this concert TCHAIKOVSKY FEVER; after the competition, the broadcasts of which were watched by more than six million people, the performances by the prize-winners have been followed throughout the world.
On 26 August Valery Gergiev and the Mariinsky Theatre will be performing the music from the ballet The Nutcracker, sure to be a true gift to the audience in Stockholm. Performed in concert, the conductor – free of the plot constraints and tempi regulated by the dancing – can destroy preconceptions of The Nutcracker as a magical Christmas fairy-tale; Gergiev conveys the tragic incandescence and the symphonic scale of this ballet score.
The festival concludes with Arnold Schoenberg’s grandiose vocal and symphonic fresco Gurrelieder which will feature three hundred performers conducted by Esa-Pekka Salonen. This work was last performed in Sweden in 1999.
For news of the Baltic Sea Festival please go to the official Facebook page at www.facebook.com/BalticSeaFest.
Both Mariinsky Theatre concerts will be broadcast live on Sweden's radio station P2 Live sverigesradio.se/sida
| user_name | | Exit |
