Season opening with the Orchestra Academy

Since 2016, the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra has hosted an ”Orchestra Academy”. The international RSPO Orchestra Academy is a one-year, advanced academic programme for young musicians. Under the guidance of the section leaders from the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra and the Piteå School of Music, the musicians receive intensive training individually, in chamber music, and orchestral playing. They also showcase their talents through a series of public chamber music concerts – such as this one featuring this year’s academy students.

The Polish composer Grażyna Bacewicz was 23 years old when she wrote her Wind Quintet in 1932, the same year she graduated in composition and violin from the Warsaw Conservatory. The music from this period is in a neoclassical style, and the quintet is a fine example of this.

Elizabeth Maconchy was a composer of great versatility and unfailing integrity, amply deserving of a British critic’s description of her as one of the most substantial composers these islands have yet produced. She studied at the Royal College of Music with Vaughan Williams, but she was attracted less by English pastoralism than by the central European modernism of Bartók and Janáček. The prize-winning quintet featured here is an early work,  composed in 1932 when she was 25 years old. 

The Czech-born Antoine Reicha was a contemporary and friend of Beethoven and was primarily active in Paris, where he became a professor at the Conservatoire (with students including Hector Berlioz). Reicha is particularly known for his writings on music theory, but his chamber music is also regularly performed. Here, we hear the Octet in a finale that brings together all the musicians.