Composer Weekend Tarrodi – Acanthes

Composer Weekend 2018 is dedicated to Andrea Tarrodi, whose music will “take your breath away”, as Dagens Nyheter wrote. Qualities often mentioned include her music’s colourful richness and peculiar play of light. She has garnered significant attention in recent years, and her work has been performed several times before at Konserthuset.

Tarrodi was inspired to compose the piece Birds of Paradise after seeing a nature film about these beautiful and unusual beings. She composed the piece for Växjö’s string orchestra, Musica Vitae, which premiered it in 2008.

This evening also offers a premiere performance: a double concerto for two violins and string orchestra entitled Acanthes. As soloists, we will hear Musica Vitae’s artistic director Malin Broman, and Pekka Kuusisto, a cutting edge and deeply original violinist whose debut at the 2016 Proms was a hit, and who was awarded the Nordic Council Music Prize in 2013.

Tarrodi originally wrote Sorrow and Joy for tenor and cello, but in this reworking from 2017, a viola interprets the vocal part with a wordless melody.

Tarrodi’s music is connected here with Arnold Schoenberg’s Verklärte Nacht, composed in 1899 when he was newly in love (originally for string sextet, the version for string orchestra came later). This passionate late-Romantic piece is one of Schoenberg’s most popular compositions.