Composer Festival – The Heaven

The second concert in the Composer Festival dedicated to Klas Torstensson features two works from the trilogy A Cycle of the North, which consists of the orchestral pieces The Mainland, The Polar Sea, and The Heaven. “A child’s feet on a sun-warmed path; a solitary man (perhaps the polar explorer, engineer Andrée from my opera The Expedition?) on an endless frozen sea; a steep road upward – perhaps to the sky.”

Of The Polar Sea, Klas Torstensson has said: “As we all know, the Arctic ice is melting. The summer of 2008 was the first in more than a hundred thousand years without a continuous ice sheet. So, although that was not the original intent, my piece The Polar Sea became a memorial to a vanished time.”

Himmelen – The Heaven – was co-commissioned by the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra and premiered at Konserthuset in 2015, conducted by Sakari Oramo. The work is inspired by three visual artworks from different eras: Anselm Kiefer’s monumental Am Anfang, Gustave Doré’s Jacob’s Ladder – illustrating the dream of Jacob from Genesis 28 – and William Blake’s Jacob’s Ladder. Could the final music box-like passage suggest a glimpse of heavenly peace?

Between The Polar Sea and The Heaven, we hear the festival’s earliest work, also rich with references to nature. und eine Springflut... (“and a spring tide…”) from 1974 was composed by a 23-year-old Torstensson. The title comes from the text of Arnold Schoenberg’s Pierrot lunaire: “And a spring tide flooded the quiet horizon…” There are passages in the music, Torstensson says, that overflow with notes – like a spring tide.

The Norrköping Symphony Orchestra appears as guest under the baton of Fredrik Burstedt. The concert opens with Charles Ives’s evocative The Unanswered Question – a piece that fascinated the young Klas Torstensson.

Volcanic forces, but also the most tender and heartbreakingly emotional music – Klas Torstensson moves between extremes. Born in Sweden but long based in the Netherlands, he is a composer with significant international reach. This year’s Composer Festival focuses primarily on his work from the past two decades, but also includes music from the early 1970s, making the festival a wide-ranging retrospective.