The RSPO Orchestra Academy and Musica Vitae

Based in Växjö, Musica Vitae is one of Sweden’s leading chamber orchestras and a regular guest at Konserthuset. For this concert, it is joined by students from the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra’s Orchestra Academy, and admission to the Main Hall is free.

Since 2016, an orchestra academy has been affiliated with the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra. The international RSPO Orchestra Academy is a one-year advanced academic programme for young musicians, run in collaboration with the Department of Music and Art at Linnaeus University in Växjö.

Benjamin Britten was eighteen and still a student at the Royal College of Music when he wrote his imaginative and beautiful Sinfonietta. He gave it opus number 1 and dedicated it to his teacher Frank Bridge.

Samuel Barber’s Knoxville: Summer of 1915 is a poetic and deeply personal evocation of childhood summer evenings in the American South. In close interplay between soprano and orchestra, a quiet, dreamlike narrative unfolds, where one can almost taste strawberries and hear rocking chairs gently creaking on still verandas. In the Capricorn Concerto, we encounter another side of Barber: three solo instruments – flute, oboe and trumpet – take centre stage, displaying virtuosity, rhythmic vitality and finesse.

Richard Wagner composed his moving and beautiful Siegfried Idyll as a gift to his wife Cosima on their wedding day, 25 December 1870. Here, we encounter an intimate and almost private side of Wagner, far removed from the monumental scale of his operas.