Konserthuset Stockholm

This year’s international Composer Festival at Konserthuset Stockholm is dedicated to British composer George Benjamin. His kaleidoscopic versatility and evocative, vivid music often has sound at the centre. With an infallible feel for the potential of the orchestra, he creates velvety sounds, sharp contrasts or fiery and intense eruptions in music that is constantly surprising.

Sibelius has been an important source of inspiration for George Benjamin, especially the original symphonic poem Tapiola, the last significant work Sibelius composed, although he lived another thirty years. Sibelius’ refined orchestral sound and polyphonic complexity have fascinated Benjamin, along with the fantastical quotation which Sibelius wrote in the score: “The Nordic region’s gloomy old forests expand, filled with secrets, in a delirium of dreams. Deep in the forest lives the woodland god, and the forest’s spirits play their secret games, hidden in the darkness.”

Like Sibelius’ Tapiola, Benjamin’s A Mind of Winter is about vast landscapes, in this case snow-covered scenery described by American poet Wallace Stevens in his poem The Snow Man. The tapestry of high strings and woodwind instruments glitters with overtones, painting a picture. The soprano appears like a beautiful winter spirit and sings that “One must have a mind of winter to regard the frost and the boughs of the pine trees crusted with snow.”

Dance Figures – George Benjamin’s first piece intended for choreography – consists of nine short movements that shift between expression and form. Transparent and almost ethereal sounds transition to an anxiously vibrating fabric of harmonies and lines that crisscross like melodic reflections.

A dramatic photo of a storm in New Mexico’s desert and an excerpt from T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land – among the twentieth century’s most central and frequently discussed literary works – form the basis for Ringed by the Flat Horizon. “I wanted to depict the uncomfortable tension that arises before an approaching storm. Three different sounds recur throughout the piece: soft unreal bells, one tight interval and one long vibrating tremolo that depicts the distant thunder.”

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Konserthuset Stockholm is one of Sweden’s great architectural masterpieces. Created during a period of expansion in Stockholm, by the Swedish architect Ivar Tengbom, it opened in 1926. Konserthuset Stockholm was built for the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra and has since the start been the dedicated venue for the Nobel Prize Award Ceremony as well as many other prestigious events.

The tour is in Swedish.

This year’s international Composer Festival at Konserthuset Stockholm is dedicated to British composer George Benjamin. His kaleidoscopic versatility and evocative, vivid music often has sound at the centre. With an infallible feel for the potential of the orchestra, he creates velvety sounds, sharp contrasts or fiery and intense eruptions in music that is constantly surprising.

George Benjamin also has a strong focus on vocals, which of course we will have a sampling of during the festival. Benjamin dreamt already at the age of 12 of composing operas, which he did with enormous success. The production of Written on Skin was a global success that was presented at the Royal Swedish Opera in Stockholm in 2015. His latest opera, Lessons in Love and Violence, took audiences by storm last season in its production at the Royal Opera House in London. 

The masterful capacity and expansive reach of the piano, from the lowest bass register to the crisp treble, makes it almost equal to an orchestra. On a piano it is easy to leap from the lowest note to the highest, but the sound hopelessly dies out after a key is struck. Strings and woodwind instruments, however, have an unbeatable ability to bind notes together. Duet is a meeting of piano and orchestra, which has a special sound resulting from Benjamin’s choice to exclude the violins.

Dream of the Song is ethereal and thought-provoking. In addition, we will hear vocal virtuosity in both the primary countertenor section, which sings Hebrew lyrics from the eleventh century, and the women’s choir singing Gabriel García Lorca in the original Spanish. And as always with Benjamin, the orchestral sound is powerfully elegant.

Stories with beautiful yet metaphorical dimensions fascinate George Benjamin. In Sometime Voices, he has taken a dive into Shakespeare and used the famous monologue from The Tempest, in which Caliban describes the magical music spreading into the surroundings.

Palimpsests are handwritten texts from antiquity and the Middle Ages on which the writing has been scraped and washed away in order to be replaced by a new one. But traces of the previous writing always remain. In George Benjamin’s Palimpsests, a melody performed by the clarinet creates the first layer. And like a palimpsest, Benjamin has “written over” the clarinet with a powerful brass chord, and soon yet another layer is added to finally create a striking fabric of sound.

Special offer for you who have a subscription

Book any concert during the Stockholm International Composer Festival 2020 with a 30 percent discount on the ticket price. The discount is activated when you log into your account.

This year’s international Composer Festival at Konserthuset Stockholm is dedicated to British composer George Benjamin. His kaleidoscopic versatility and evocative, vivid music often has sound at the centre.

Franck Ollu will lead an ensemble from the Royal Swedish Orchestra in George Benjamin’s Into the Little Hill, a lyrical tale based on the story of the Pied Piper of Hamelin. In addition to both vocal soloists, Benjamin uses less common instruments such as the bass flute, cimbalom, banjo and basset horn.

We will also hear his duet for two alto violins and At First Light for chamber orchestra, inspired by a painting by William Turner. As a contrast, we will hear Anton Webern’s Concerto for Nine Instruments, where little fragments of melody created from a logically consistent and melodic twelve-note series are tossed about among the different instruments.

Special offer for you who have a subscription

Book any concert during the Stockholm International Composer Festival 2020 with a 30 percent discount on the ticket price. The discount is activated when you log into your account.