This year's Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra Festival takes place from November 10-16.
Centered on British composer and conductor Sir George Benjamin, the festival also presents the Finnish Premiere of Sunfall by Joel Järventausta and an exciting chamber concert with music by Hans Abrahamsen, Olivier Messiaen and more.
Finnish Premiere of Joel Järventausta’s Sunfall
Sunfall was originally commissioned for the London Symphony Orchestra through the LSO Discovery Panufnik Composers Scheme, generously supported by Lady Hamlyn and the Helen Hamlyn Trust. Telling the story of sunsets, the work was especially inspired by a Thomas Moran painting from 1875 called Fiercely the Red Sun Descending and a book by Cormac McCarthy called Blood Meridian.
About his inspiration, Järventausta writes:
I attempted to translate some of this imagery into music in my piece. Zoomed in, the sun exhibits danger and heat, reflected in the more dramatic passages of my work; zoomed out it exhibits peace, light and beauty, reflected in the more still and melodic passages. The majority of the piece was written in the countryside, during the lockdown period of 2020, where I was accompanied by the setting sun - not unlike the one depicted in Moran’s painting - many a night of composing. Perhaps this adds yet another layer of meaning behind the title of the work.
Performance details
Into the Little Hill
November 15-16, 2023
Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra
Sir George Benjamin, conductor
Curated by Sir George Benjamin
Hans Abrahamsen’s Walden for wind quintet is on the program, when Sir George Benjamin curates a beautiful chamber concert.
Originally commissioned by the Funen Wind Quintet, the work was inspired by Henry David Thoreau’s Walden.
About the work, Hans Abrahamsen writes:
Walden was written in a style of re-cycling and “new simplicity”. A lot of superfluous material has been peeled away in order to give space to different qualities such as identity and clarity. Various layers are encountered in the quintet such as the organic (growth, flowering, Decay), concretism (mechanical patterns) and finally the descriptive (distant horn calls and other ghost-like music of the past enter our consciousness like a dream).
Performance details
Fantasy
November 12, 2023
Musicians from the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra
Listen to Walden
