Bartók and French Delicatessen

With a focus on France, in this programme the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra welcomes conductor Alain Altinoglu and violinist Renaud Capuçon; together, they will perform music by Betsy Jolas (b. 1926) and Pascal Dusapin (b. 1955).

A Little Summer Suite was commissioned by the Berlin Philharmonic, and the piece premiered a few months before Jolas’ 90th birthday in 2016. The piece is thought to be a musical stroll with no predetermined destination, in which one might end up anywhere at all.

Pascal Dusapin’s violin concerto Aufgang is from 2011 and is filled with ingenuity and sonorous surprises, with the soloist and orchestra closely mirroring one another. The music is composed specifically for French star soloist Renaud Capuçon.

Alain Altinoglu is chief conductor of the Théâtre Royal de la Monnaie in Brussels and regularly guest-conducts the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York and festivals in Bayreuth and Salzburg.

The concert concludes with Bartók’s hit piece, Concerto for Orchestra. Bartók’s beloved Hungary had become an ally of Nazi Germany, and as an antifascist, Bartók saw no other way out than to emigrate to the US.

He had trouble acclimating to his new home country, and he began having symptoms of what would eventually be diagnosed as leukemia. In the midst of this darkness, a prestigious commission came up in 1943: conductor Serge Koussevitzky wanted an orchestral work for his Boston Symphony Orchestra. Perhaps the distance from his native country gave the influence of folk music such a central role in the Concerto for Orchestra?