Egīls ŠĒFERS – clarinet
Conductor Petri SAKARI
Programme:
Carl NIELSEN – Concerto for clarinet and orchestra, Op. 57
Jean SIBELIUS – Symphonic poem “Tapiola”
Jean SIBELIUS – Symphony No. 1 in E minor, Op. 39
The Finnish national composer Jean Sibelius and the Danish national composer Carl Nielsen are both honoured this year as 150th-birthday celebrants. Carl Nielsen’s birthday fell in June, while Sibelius was born on 8 December – and December suits an anniversary concert all the better because on the 6th Finland celebrates the 98th anniversary of its independence.
On the LNSO podium for this concert – the Finnish master Petri SAKARI. Throughout his career he has regularly conducted Finland’s leading symphony orchestras and spent several years as artistic director of the Iceland Symphony Orchestra; it was Petri Sakari, incidentally, who was given the honour of conducting the opening concert of Reykjavík’s new concert hall Harpa in 2011. Sakari has also held leading positions with the Swedish Chamber Orchestra, the Lohja City Orchestra, the Gävle Symphony Orchestra and the Turku Philharmonic. As a guest conductor he has appeared often in Denmark and Sweden, and has also performed with the orchestras of Bonn, Stuttgart, Saarbrücken, Montpellier, Vienna, The Hague, Liège, Luxembourg, Bournemouth, the BBC and other symphony orchestras. Petri Sakari has been a guest in Mexico City, São Paulo, Tokyo and Singapore. He has conducted opera productions at the Finnish National Opera, the Royal Swedish Opera, the opera houses of Gothenburg and Malmö, the Icelandic Opera and the St Gallen City Theatre. Online one can read high praise for Petri Sakari’s interpretations of Finnish music, and phrases such as “fiery grip”, “profound intellect” and “purposeful drive” give us every reason to expect a truly inspiring concert in Riga. The programme includes two works by Sibelius and one by Nielsen.
Carl NIELSEN (1865–1931) is one of Denmark’s most important composers. The Danish music historian Vagn Kappel wrote that Nielsen saved the Danes from “the possibility of suffocating in wretched imitations of German late Romanticism”. Nielsen was an utterly free spirit, and in the course of time his music travelled from Brahmsian Romanticism to a neoclassicism coloured entirely by his own personality. Nielsen’s catalogue contains works in every genre, and the wider world remembers him above all as a symphonist, whereas the Danes themselves would probably name his songs first.
With the LNSO and Petri Sakari we will hear Carl Nielsen’s Clarinet Concerto (1928). Here it is worth recalling the popular quotation in which Nielsen describes the many-sided nature of the clarinet, saying that “the clarinet can be both warm-hearted and completely hysterical, as soothing as balsam one moment and howling like a tram on badly greased rails the next”. The soloist will be Egīls Šēfers, whose command of the instrument is truly phenomenal, so we shall hear the tenderness, the hysteria and – who knows – the tram as well.
From the works of Jean SIBELIUS (1865–1957) – figuratively speaking, the end and the beginning. We will hear the First Symphony (1899), composed in his early period, and one of Sibelius’s last great orchestral works – the symphonic tone painting “Tapiola” (1926). The First Symphony shows us a still fairly young composer (Sibelius was 33 at the time) who, with notable mastery and perhaps with some wish to take his place beside the great masters of Western Europe, wrote a powerful and hugely appealing symphonic work. The spell of the first movement is especially strong, while the third movement charms with an almost un-Nordic playfulness.
“Tapiola”, in turn, is a tribute to Tapio, the lord of the forest described in the Kalevala, whose realm is one of “gloomy dark spruces” and “pale grey aspens”, who himself wears “a hat of needles and a beard of lichen”, and with whom “wise old Väinämöinen” has dealings more than once (in Linards Laicens’s Latvian translation). The forest scenes in the Kalevala are wonderfully beautiful and poetic, whereas Sibelius’s work is full of mysticism, unusual orchestral textures, boldly drawn passages and an unexpectedly warm resolution that at once makes one revise one’s travel plans for the near future to include a visit to Ainola, the Sibelius family’s house in the woods.
Pre-concert talks at 18.00 in the White Hall of the Great Guild!