Kerson Leong & Camerata Nordica – Göteborg & Stockholm

Address

Linnégatan,
114 60 Stockholm

Kerson Leong & Camerata Nordica – Göteborg & Stockholm

Description

Few programmes are likely to capture the shifting of the seasons as well as this one – from the tender melancholy of the Norwegian spring to the urban heat of Buenos Aires' yearning summer. At the centre of this concert is the Canadian violinist Kerson Leong, one of the most outstanding soloists of his generation. The evening opens with Grieg's Våren (Last Spring), the second of his Two Elegiac Melodies for string orchestra, Op. 34. The work was originally a song to a text by the Norwegian poet Aasmund Olavsson Vinje, but was arranged for strings by Grieg in 1880. The poem depicts the beauty of Norwegian nature as it awakens after winter, seen through the eyes of a man who fears he is experiencing it for the last time. It is music of shimmering and painful beauty – a perfect opening to an evening shaped by nature and the passing of time. Max Richter's Recomposed: The Four Seasons (2012) uses Vivaldi's baroque masterpiece as raw material and retains only a fraction of the original, filtered through a contemporary musical idiom. The result is something that feels at once deeply familiar and entirely new: a meditation on memory, landscape and transformation that has become one of the most performed and recorded classical works of the 2000s. After the interval comes the Finnish composer Erna Tauro's Höstvisa (1965), originally written for voice and piano with a beloved text by Tove Jansson. It is performed here in an arrangement for string orchestra by Hans-Erik Holgersson and, without the text, offers an intimate moment of reflection. This subdued song serves as a bridge between the two halves of the programme, where autumn follows hard on the heels of summer. The concert ends with Astor Piazzolla's The Four Seasons of Buenos Aires, four tango-influenced musical portraits of life in Argentina's capital, composed during the 1960s and 70s. The work is performed here in Leonid Desyatnikov's brilliant arrangement for string orchestra, in which allusions to Vivaldi's original are woven in. The four movements crackle with rhythmic energy, passion and nostalgia and bring the evening's journey through the seasons to a glowing close. Programme: Grieg: Two Melodies, Op. 53 Max Richter: Recomposed: Vivaldi's The Four Seasons Piazzolla: Las Cuatro Estaciones Portenas Erna Tauro: Höstvisa