En drömresa

Lotta Wennäkoski: Of Footprints and Light (Helsinki Variations)

Of Footprints and Light is a work filled with mysterious moods and unusual sounds; among other things, the scores describes whispering voices and a percussion section reinforced with high-heel shoes and seashells. The work was first performed in autumn 2019, when it opened the Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra’s Helsinki Variations project to mark the centenary of Finnish independence. Helsinki Variations will last three years and feature new works by six Finnish composers.

Born in 1970, Lotta Wennäkoski made her breakthrough as a composer in 1999. Over recent years she has been commissioned to write works for the Last Night of the Proms and the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra among others. Her first opera, about Regine Olsen (1822-1904) who for a brief time was engaged to philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, will premier in 2022.

Berwald: Traumreise

Traumreise (Dream journeys) consists of nine lieder written in Swedish, French and German by Franz Berwald (1796-1868), originally composed for voice and piano. The first and most well-known begins: “Outside, the summer wind blows/in the lime tree the cuckoo calls”. Many of the others on the other hand were long forgotten, until rediscovered by soprano Lisa Larsson in the library of the Royal Swedish Academy of Music. She made a selection and then asked Malmö-based composer Rolf Martinsson to combine and orchestrate the lieder into what Martinsson describes as an “orchestral song cycle”. The result is a dreamlike journey between moods, stories and languages. The work was performed in Zurich in November 2018.

Brahms: Serenade No. 1

Johannes Brahms was living in his hometown of Hamburg when he wrote his two serenades in 1858 and 1859. Twenty-five years of age at the time, he was employed as a musician at the court of the small Principality of Lippe. He had begun working on sketches for his first symphony a year earlier but that would prove to be a drawn-out process to say the least: it was not performed until 21 years later in 1876. Even if Brahms’ two serenades can be viewed as part of this work, as exercises in the art of composing for large orchestras, they are very much works of artistic integrity and substance in their own right. Serenade No. 1 is a pastoral in six movements. It begins with a horn fanfare, followed by the depiction of various rural scenes: magnificent landscapes, idylls, hunting, peasant dances and bittersweet melancholy. The entire work is suffused with the composer’s love of the forest and nature. And by the by, the name Brahms may be derived from the German word for shrub broom.