Composer Weekend – Music as a revelation

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.”