Programme

Since 2016, the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra (RSPO) offers one year of training on site at Konserthuset Stockholm. The RSPO Orchestra Academy aims to give participating students heightened knowledge and understanding of the profession by giving them the possibility to work with – and alongside – one of Europe’s leading symphony orchestras.

The students will receive individual tuition on their instrument by tutors that are predominantly leaders and principals of the orchestra. In addition, extensive chamber music playing is a vital part of the course as well as seminars in stage presence and orchestral praxis.

Participating as well in this concert are students of the University College of Operahögskolan Stockholm.

Konserthuset’s big band is a new experience every time. For each performance, band leaders Peter Asplund and Magnus Lindgren both assemble a group of instrumentalists who will give character to the selected theme. This time the band is composed of the young Swedish jazz elite – and as a guest artist, we will hear Amanda Ginsburg, a new rising star among Swedish jazz singers and winner of a Swedish Grammy Award 2019 for the album Jag har funderat på en sak (”I've Been Thinking About Something”). Tonight’s theme: Younger Than Springtime.

“I let my sound bask in the musical language of Nordic melancholy. My goal is to carefully safeguard the legacy of some of the most beloved names in Swedish jazz and songs,” says Amanda Ginsburg who was nominated Newcomer of the Year by P2 Jazzkatten, Swedish Radio’s annual tribute to Swedish jazz. She was lauded in the press for her first full-length album. Inspired by Swedish icons such as Monica Zetterlund and Jan Johansson, and with a few splashes of humour from Hasse and Tage, Amanda Ginsburg conveys with unerring musical jazz sensibility something both direct and deeply personal.

Spring’s Blue House Jazz subscription
Reserve spring’s jazz subscription. Three concerts for SEK 920. 
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The Stockholm Concert Hall at Hötorget 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. The Stockholm Concert Hall 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.

Since its inception in 1984, the Norwegian Vertavo String Quartet has established itself as one of the top quartets in the world. The quartet has its own concert subscription in Oslo and tours Europe, Japan and the US. The quartet has performed on concert stages including Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, Barbican and Kings Place in London, and has also appeared at the annual Aldeburgh Festival.

Here, the ensemble performs music by three composers who have all been pioneers in various ways. Joseph Haydn experimented with form and content and developed both the symphony and the string quartet; Elfrida Andrée was a female progenitor of nineteenth century Sweden and Beethoven blasted through the traditional frameworks of the string quartet.

When Haydn planned a new journey to England in the early 1790s, he composed a handful of symphonies, music for piano and the six quartets dedicated to Count Anton Apponyi. This music, with its exquisite balance and extroverted energy, comprises a highlight of Viennese classical music.

Elfrida Andrée composed chamber music and symphonic pieces, and was active as an orchestra conductor. The fact that her major role models were Beethoven, Mendelssohn-Bartholdy and Schubert can be heard in this marvellous quartet from 1887. Its world premiere was given by four female string musicians in 1895, which was the first time in the Nordic region that a string quartet composed by a woman was performed by female musicians.

Beethoven’s string quartet, Opus 131, is from his later period. It is as if in the music, he is seeking freedom for thought and soul. Perhaps this is also why this piece speaks to us so powerfully, with its warmth, imagination and intensity, across all historical barriers.

Legendary singer Eino Grön celebrates his eightieth year with a major concert at Konserthuset Stockholm. He released his first album in 1958 and has released nearly thirty albums and numerous compilations since then. He is without hesitation one of Finland’s best known and most popular artists. To most people he is mainly a tango singer, but he also performs schlager, jazz, spirituals and interprets the repertoires of other artists. Also participating in this anniversary concert are singer Annimaria Rinne, and singer Dimitri Keiski, who became familiar to a broader audience in 2011 upon winning Swedish True Talent. He has also performed the leading role of Freddie Mercury in the Queen musical, Champions.

Tommie Haglund is one of Scandinavia’s most distinctive and visionary composers. Hearing his music is like finding yourself in a uniquely sonically beautiful cosmos in which darkness is fully present, but so too is an irrepressible, life-giving light. Tommie Haglund is garnering more and more attention, both at home in Sweden and internationally. In 2014 he was awarded one of the finest awards a Nordic composer can receive: the Royal Swedish Academy of Music’s major Christ Johnson Prize, with the statement: “With liberating gravity and a personalised appeal, Tommie Haglund welcomes listeners to his poetic universe.” Now he is at the centre of Konserthuset Stockholm’s Composer Weekend 2019.

At this inaugural concert, the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra will give the world premiere of a newly composed commissioned symphony. Tommie Haglund says the following about the music: “Swedenborg says that true innocence is found in nothing other than wisdom. That a person is wiser the more innocent she is. But we live in a time when innocence can almost be considered a joke. That says quite a bit about our time and our need for access to an inner state that can resist all of these threats. My symphony is an attempt to describe my feelings about this, to the best of my ability. I have tried to weave in diabolical, painful and dreamily illuminated states. Like life itself.”

The concert will begin with Serenata per Diotima, which was composed for the 10-year celebration of the string orchestra at the music school Kulturskolan i Halmstad. The piece was revised before a performance at the Luzerne Music Center in New York State, USA, where Haglund was a guest composer in the summer of 2014. The year before the piece was composed, Tommie Haglund’s first grandchild was born and he has explained how the look in the little girl’s eyes echoes in the music. In Plato’s dialogue The Symposium, which addresses the essence of love, Diotima is the priestess.

Slowness is of tangible importance in Haglund’s music. The hymn An die Nacht, Hymns to the Night, is a symphonic poem for violin and orchestra that slowly emerges in the sleepless night. There is rest here, but also pain.

Tommie Haglund studied composition under Sven-Eric Johanson, and studied privately with Frederick Delius’ amanuensis Eric Fenby, professor of composition at the Royal Academy of Music in London. As we can hear in Intermezzo from the opera Fennimore and Gerda, there is a certain kinship between Delius’ dreamy and sensual music and Haglund’s emotional, personal visions.

Tommie Haglund grew up in Halmstad, where he still works today. In 2017 he was also presented with the Halmstad Municipality award of honour. La Rosa Profunda – The Infinite Rose is a commissioned piece from the city for the 700-year anniversary in 2007.

Joakim Svenheden is principal concertmaster of the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra, and has soloed with the orchestra on many occasions. At this soup concert, Joakim performs with British cellist Marie Macleod, who has been solo cellist with the orchestra since spring 2013, and pianist Martin Sturfält. Together they will present Shostakovich’s Piano Trio No. 1 and a trio by Amanda Maier-Röntgen.

Shostakovich composed his trio in 1923, when he was only 16 years old and in a sanatorium after a period of illness. He initially called the piece Poème and wrote it for Tatjana Glivenko, a girl with whom he fell in love during his convalescence. The music features many sharp contrasts in both tempo and emotion, traits which, in addition to lyrical melodies and challenging harmonies, were already distinguishing qualities of his music early on. 

Maier-Röntgen was active as a violinist and composer and in 1872, she became Sweden’s first female music director. She was quite certain of her talent and was reluctant to subsequently modify any of her compositions. It is unclear how many pieces she composed, as there is no complete list of her works, but she wrote the recently discovered piano trio in the spring of 1874 in Leipzig, where she had arrived during the autumn of 1873. 

Menu: Fish soup served with horseradish and croutons

Konserthuset Play!
A unique performance of Amanda Maier-Röntgen’s shimmering, lyrical Violin Concerto in D Minor from 1875, with the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra’s Claudia Bonfiglioli in the role of soloist, and the orchestra under the baton of Chief Conductor Sakari Oramo. Listen

The Stockholm Concert Hall at Hötorget 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. The Stockholm Concert Hall 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.

The Stockholm Concert Hall at Hötorget 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. The Stockholm Concert Hall 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.

Tommie Haglund is one of Scandinavia’s most distinctive and visionary composers. Hearing his music is like finding yourself in a uniquely sonically beautiful cosmos in which darkness is fully present, but so too is an irrepressible, life-giving light. Tommie Haglund is garnering more and more attention, both at home in Sweden and internationally. In 2014 he was awarded one of the finest awards a Nordic composer can receive: the Royal Swedish Academy of Music’s major Christ Johnson Prize. From the statement: “With liberating gravity and a personalised appeal, Tommie Haglund welcomes listeners to his poetic universe.” Now he is at the centre of Konserthuset Stockholm’s Composer Weekend 2019.

Serenata per Diotima was composed for the 10-year celebration of the string orchestra at the music school Kulturskolan i Halmstad. The piece was revised before a performance at the Luzerne Music Center in New York State, USA, where Haglund was a guest composer in the summer of 2014. The year before the piece was composed, Tommie Haglund’s first grandchild was born and he has explained how the look in the little girl’s eyes echoes in the music. In Plato’s dialogue The Symposium, which addresses the essence of love, Diotima is the priestess.

The cello concerto Flaminis Aura is music “that pushes forward with an ever-present melodiousness.” This wording is from the jury’s statement for the Christ Johnson Prize which Tommie Haglund received in 2014. The piece was composed already in 2002 during an excruciating and threatening period of illness, when Haglund lived with death as a constant presence. The title refers to a Latin expression for a Christian ritual state experienced just before a religious vision. It is also the title of an album of music by Tommie Haglund, including this Cello Concerto from 2016 which was unanimously critically acclaimed.

Tommie Haglund studied composition under Sven-Eric Johanson, and studied privately with Frederick Delius’ amanuensis Eric Fenby, professor of composition at the Royal Academy of Music in London. As we can hear in Intermezzo from the opera Fennimore and Gerda, there is also a certain kinship between Delius’ dreamy and sensual music and Haglund’s emotional, personal visions.

Tommie Haglund grew up in Halmstad, where he still works today. In 2017 he was also presented with the Halmstad Municipality award of honour. La Rosa Profunda – The Infinite Rose is a commissioned piece from the city for the 700-year anniversary in 2007.

The Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra’s commission for Composer Weekend with Tommie Haglund is a recently composed symphony, about which he says the following: “Swedenborg says that true innocence is found in nothing other than wisdom. That a person is wiser the more innocent she is. But we live in a time when innocence can almost be considered a joke. That says quite a bit about our time and our need for access to an inner state that can resist all of these threats. My symphony is an attempt to describe my feelings about this, to the best of my ability. I have tried to weave in diabolical, painful and dreamily illuminated states. Like life itself.”