Season Premiere – Norrköping Symphony Orchestra

Andrea Tarrodi wrote the piece Paradisfåglar after watching a nature film by David Attenborough about Oceania’s beautiful and fantastical creatures. The piece is a visual and magnificent journey characterized by the birds’ colorful splendor.

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Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 1 in D major (1889) marks the beginning of one of the most personal and visionary symphonic journeys in music history. The work, which Mahler referred to as a “tone poem in symphonic form,” bears the traits that would come to characterize his music, notably the vast range between intimacy and irony, as well as nature lyricism and existential gravity.

Just like in Andrea Tarrodi’s Paradisfåglar, we hear music in nature’s awakening – birdsong, horn sounds, and a distant melody from Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen emerge from nothing. The second movement is a ländler, a rustic dance in rough-hewn Viennese style. The third movement of the symphony surprises with its dark humor: in a funeral march based on the children’s song Brother John in a minor key, grotesque irony and melancholy meet. In the finale, Mahler breaks out into a dramatic struggle, where darkness and light contend until the music finally shines in triumphant D major. Mahler called Symphony No. 1 “a world unto itself,” and even here we hear the seed of the cosmic dimension that would come to characterize his entire oeuvre.

Samuel Barber composed his famous violin concerto in 1939. The creation of the concerto was complicated and disrupted by a series of external circumstances – and perhaps that is why it has a structure very unusual for the concerto form: the two opening movements are warmly lyrical and melodic, each approximately ten minutes long – but are abruptly interrupted by a disproportionately short and breathtakingly virtuosic finale, in a perpetuum mobile. How these movements are truly connected remains shrouded in mystery; but it is certain that Samuel Barber himself was satisfied with his creation and wanted it just that way.

Practical information

Linköping Konsert & Kongress opens: 17:30
The ticket office is open: 18:00-19:00
Doors open for the event: 18:30
Event start: 19:00
Length: approximately 2 hours
Intermission: Yes