Chamber music

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.

The academy also presents itself through a series of public chamber music concerts, such as this one featuring this year’s academy students. On this occasion, we  experience yet another collaboration between the orchestra academies of the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and the National Polish Radio Symphony Orchestra in Katowice.

The concert begins with an originally orchestrated work by the British-American composer Anna Clyne, which also includes recorded sounds from a music box that her father gave to her mother when he was courting her, as well as ambient sounds from her childhood in the coastal town of Brighton.

"It is five instruments conversing with each other," is how Carl Nielsen described his often-performed and much-loved Wind Quintet. He also noted that it cannot "be played without a deep feeling for nature." The piece is filled with surprising effects, but also pastoral and idyllic elements.

After the interval, the programme continues with music by two of Poland's foremost 20th-century composers. In Witold Lutosławski’s relatively early piece, Little Suite from 1950, the inspiration from folk music is clearly audible. Like Lutosławski, Grażyna Bacewicz found ways to maintain artistic integrity within the controlling communist climate of the mid-20th century. Her Concerto for String Orchestra from 1948 has become one of her most performed and beloved works, admired by, among others, her colleague Lutosławski.

***

The partnership between Konserthuset Stockholm and the Polish Radio Symphony Orchestra in Katowice is taking place in 2024-2025, under the project name Institutions of the Future 2024-2025. This project is supported by the Polish Ministry of Culture under their Inspiring Culture initiative.

Welcome to a concert by one of the most influential and acclaimed composers of our time – Max Richter!

His characteristic fusion of classical technique and electronic technology, heard on both solo albums and countless pieces for film, dance, art and fashion, have paved the way for a new generation of musicians and made him an iconic composer with fans around the world.

His ninth solo album, In A Landscape, is the first one composed and recorded at his peaceful new studio in rural Oxfordshire. According to Richter, it is a fleeting self-portrait of a musician in constant motion. But it also goes much deeper than that. It is music about “uniting polarities.” Bringing together the electronic and the acoustic, the human and the natural world, the big questions of life and the quiet pleasures of living.

After grappling with big ideas and thorny social and political questions, the making of In A Landscape has opened up another, greener world for Richter. Above all, making music remains “a way to make a kind of alternate reality,” a constructed world “where everything is in its place.”

The French-Albanian pianist Marie-Ange Nguci has positioned herself as one of the most exciting young soloists on the world's major stages. The term 'unique' is worn out, but it's difficult to find better words to describe her. Nguci was admitted to the conservatory in Paris at the age of 13 and graduated three years later with top marks. Since then, she has studied both pedagogy and musical analysis in Paris, as well as conducting at the University of Music and Performing Arts in Vienna.

In recent years, she has made her debut on virtually all of the world's major stages: Musikverein in Vienna, Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, Suntory Hall in Tokyo, Tonhalle in Zurich, the Sydney Opera House, Philharmonie de Paris. The list could go on. With the concert together with the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra in Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 21 (Thursday, November 21) and this recital, she makes her long-awaited debut at Konserthuset Stockholm.

We hear her in musically exciting and technically demanding pieces such as Scriabin's fifth piano sonata, which alternates between floating impressionism and explosive chords, Ravel's Gaspard de la Nuit with its cascading soundscapes, and Prokofiev's intense sixth piano sonata.

Schumann's Kreisleriana, subtitled Fantasies for Pianoforte, oscillates between feverish nervousness and darkly veiled contemplations. He wrote them for his beloved wife Clara but nevertheless dedicated them to Frédéric Chopin, whom he considered to be a genius.

A string quartet from the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra is joined by the orchestra's pianist Stefan Lindgren in Brahms' generously melodic and adventurous Piano Quintet. It was a work that underwent several transformations during composition before Brahms was satisfied. Much of the inspiration he drew from the model of Beethoven's Appassionata Sonata for piano.

The concert opens with the compelling quartet from the late 1920s by the Dutch composer Henriëtte Bosmans. She was herself a concert pianist and wrote a plethora of piano music, but as we can hear in this melodically swirling quartet, she also had a fantastic ability to express her musical visions through string instruments.

Austrian Johanna Müller-Hermann was well-known and respected during her lifetime. She studied with greats such as Alexander Zemlinsky and Franz Schmidt and herself taught music theory at the conservatory in Vienna. We hear her harmonically dense and often exquisitely beautiful string quartet from 1910.