Bjarnason

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Despite a population no larger than that of Bologna, Iceland is today one of the liveliest countries on the world music scene, as the recent Oscar awarded to Hildur Guðnadóttir for the Joker soundtrack shows. Daníel Bjarnason (1979) is in turn one of the most important voices of contemporary Iceland, both as a composer and as a conductor. In the 2023-24 season the Gothenburg Symphony gave the world première of A Fragile Hope, part of a series of pieces commissioned from leading Scandinavian composers with the aim of highlighting the vulnerability of marine life. Its musical language is tied to personal memories, steeped in the natural impressions of a country unique in the world, suspended between water and fire.
Concerto for violin and orchestra
Italian première
20 min.

Commissioned by the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the Iceland Symphony Orchestra, Bjarnason’s violin concerto «Scordatura» came to light in 2017 under Gustavo Dudamel. The title evokes the unconventional tuning of the violin, which is called on for very bold technical solutions, from lightning broken chords to hyper-virtuosic cadenzas, exploiting the instrument’s palette of colour to the extreme limit of its lowest notes. Bjarnason lays out Scordatura in a single organic movement lasting 25 minutes. From its first performance, with Pekka Kuusisto as soloist, the piece was an immediate success and has established itself in the repertoire of twenty-first-century music.
Benjamin Britten

Peter Grimes, Benjamin Britten’s first theatrical success, in 1945, tells the tragic story of a solitary fisherman at odds with a stifling community that fears and condemns him on the strength of its prejudices. At its centre is the conflict between the individual and public opinion, between ambiguous truths and entrenched conformity. With music that ranges from poignant lyricism to the darkest dramatic tension, Britten paints a complex protagonist in a merciless social setting, turning a personal drama into a universal reflection on intolerance. From the score the composer drew a number of symphonic pieces — the Four Sea Interludes and the Passacaglia — which distil Grimes’s tragic spiral. In these pieces nature takes the protagonist’s place, declaring itself a force close to man’s fate, and indifferent to it.
Jean Sibelius

In 1904 Bologna was the first Italian city to perform music by Sibelius. Since that concert, conducted by Arturo Toscanini, the city has kept a constant bond with the greatest Finnish composer, able to speak a language at once solipsistic and universal. The Seventh, completed in 1924, closes his symphonic journey, shortly before a creative silence that lasted almost thirty years, until his death. In this «symphonic fantasy», as Sibelius himself christened it after almost six years of work, one finds the superb and enigmatic atmospheres of his poetics, with a freedom of writing that no longer troubles to mark off separate movements but creates a single expanding arch. His swansong.
Orchestra of Teatro Comunale di Bologna

45 min. before the concert begins, the audience is invited to an introduction to the programme by Luca Baccolini, on the lower floor of the Theatre. Luca Baccolini
journalist, writer and music populariser, works with the Bologna newsroom of Repubblica and is on the editorial staff of the monthly Classic Voice. For Newton Compton he has published ten books on the history of Bologna. He writes for the stage and works as an essayist and lecturer with the most important Italian opera and symphonic institutions. SECTOR 1
Full price: €45
Over 65: €35
Reduced 30-35: €30
U30: €25