Gardolińska & Montero

aug.

Saturday 19:00

EVENT DATE PASSED

To touch and allow yourself to be touched on an emotional level is central to Mats Larsson Gothe, whose Symphony No. 4 will premiere this evening. The Venezuelan composer and pianist Gabriela Montero’s method is different. She wants her piano concerto to confirm our ideas of Latin American music while considering the adage “All is not gold that glitters”, with reference to the situation in her country. Beethoven always moves us. This time in his dynamic, extrovert, vigorous seventh symphony.

The concert is broadcast live on Swedish Radio P2

Participants

Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra

The Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra is a multiple-award-winning ensemble renowned for its high artistic standard and stylistic breadth, as well as collaborations with the world’s finest composers, conductors, and soloists. It regularly tours all over Europe and the world and has an extensive and acclaimed recording catalogue.

Daniel Harding has been Music Director of the SRSO since 2007, and since 2019 also its Artistic Director. His tenure will last throughout the 2024/2025 season. Two of the orchestra’s former chief conductors, Herbert Blomstedt and Esa-Pekka Salonen, have since been named Conductors Laureate, and continue to perform regularly with the orchestra.

The Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra performs at Berwaldhallen, concert hall of the Swedish Radio, and is a cornerstone of Swedish public service broadcasting. Its concerts are heard weekly on the Swedish classical radio P2 and regularly on national public television SVT. Several concerts are also streamed on-demand on Berwaldhallen Play and broadcast globally through the EBU.
Marta Gardolińska, conductor

Polish conductor Marta Gardolińska is Music Director of the Opéra national de Lorraine since autumn 2021, recently having her contract extended throughout the 2025/26 season, and was Principal Guest Conductor of the Orquestra Simfònica de Barcelona in 2022–2024. She came to international attention in 2018 conducting the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra in two highly successful subscription weeks. This led to a Dudamel Fellowship with the Los Angeles Philharmonic during the 2019/20 season. She has since worked with world-renowned orchestras including the London Symphony Orchestra, Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra, City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, Scottish Chamber Orchestra, and the Danish National Symphony Orchestra.

The 23/24 season saw Gardolińska make her debuts with the Kammerorchester Potsdam, BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, Frankfurt Radio Symphony, and her subscription debut with the San Francisco Symphony. She conducted the Orquestra Simfònica de Barcelona in Haydn’s The Creation, and with both the BBC Scottish and the Frankfurt Radio, she interpreted music by her countrymen, Lutosławski’s Concerto for Orchestra and Bacewicz’ Overture for Orchestra.

During the 2020/21 season, she made her hugely successful French debut with the Opéra national de Lorraine, conducting a new production of Zemlinsky’s Der Traumgörge. She has also conducted Bizet’s Carmen at the Opéra national du Rhin in Strasbourg and Verdi’s La Traviata at the Lorraine opera. She studied conducting in Warsaw and Vienna, and was awarded the title “Outstanding Pole in Austria” in 2016 for her efforts in spreading Polish culture and music.
Gabriela Montero, piano

Venezuelan pianist Gabriela Montero is a critically acclaimed musician, improviser, and composer. Highlights from the 2023/24 season included an extensive US tour with the Sinfónica de Minería from Mexico City, featuring her piano concerto Latin Concerto, as well as performances with the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra and Jaime Martín, Polish National Radio Symphony Orchestra and Marin Alsop, and the Antwerp Symphony and Elim Chan. She has a creative partnership with the National Arts Centre Orchestra that lasts through 2025. Other recent highlights include a European tour with the City of Birmingham Symphony and Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla, as well as the launch of “Gabriela Montero at Prager”, an ongoing artistic residency established at the Prager Family Center for the Arts in Easton, Maryland.

Montero is a committed and vocal advocate for human rights. In May 2024, she was awarded the Václav Havel International Prize for Creative Dissent by the Human Rights Foundation, who previously recognised her with Outstanding Work in the Field of Human Rights by the Human Rights Foundation for her ongoing commitment to human rights advocacy in Venezuela. Additionally, she was named an Honorary Consul by Amnesty International in 2015.

An award-winning and bestselling recording artist, her most recent album features her own Latin Concerto and Ravel’s Piano Concerto in G Major, recorded with the Orchestra of the Americas in Chile. Her previous recording, featuring her own orchestral piece Ex Patria and Rachmaninov’s Piano Concerto No. 2, was awarded with a Latin Grammy for Best Classical Album. The tone poem Ex Patria, premiered in 2011 by the Academy of St Martin in the Fields, was Montero’s formal debut as a composer.

Programme

Concert length: 2 hrs 10 mins with intermission

MATS LARSSON GOTHE: Symphony No. 4

26 min

Commissioned by and dedicated to the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra

Symphony No. 4 is absolute music, without any programme or narrative. It doesn’t depict something extramusical that I’ve chosen to translate into music. In this way I leave it up to the listener to associate freely or create their own images, depending on how they perceive music. I prefer to describe the work in purely compositional terms. I can thus say that everything in the symphony is based on an accentuated motif occurring in the very first bar in the orchestra’s lower-pitched instruments. This motif is developed throughout the symphony, which comprises a single cohesive movement in a kind of sonata form, involving an exposition – consisting of a first subject and a second subject – a development and a coda. The harmonies are often based on various voicings of a major chord with an added sixth. Trombones and a tuba play an important role, but all the instrumental groups are to be heard, for the most part in a lamenting, plaintive mood – not least the solo violin, which is a prominent voice in this drama.

Anyone not wishing to share in the composer’s further personal thoughts about the content of the symphony can stop reading here. The above information is fully sufficient.

But from my own perspective I can add that I was really angry when I wrote the work – angry that a country had conducted a full-scale invasion of another country, totally unprovoked. My fury at this meant that the symphony occasionally explodes, musically speaking. My compositions are often shaped by what I need to express and process at the time of writing. The result here is music that channels frustration and pain, and feelings that turn into abhorrence and sometimes even stronger emotions. It is music about life and death, but it also contains beautiful points of repose.

When this war is over – hopefully in the near future – my symphony will remain as what I hope will be a stand-alone work, regardless of what sparked it off. The coda, which starts with a harp solo, expresses for me a “Once upon a time …” feeling. The end points to a new dawn. One might perhaps summarise the symphony using Martin Luther King’s famous words:

“… out of the mountain of despair, a stone of hope.”

Mats Larsson Gothe, May 2024
GABRIELA MONTERO: Piano Concerto No. 1 – Latin Concerto

37 min

In her Piano Concerto No. 1, Latin Concerto (2016), the Venezuelan pianist and composer Gabriela Montero pays tribute to the musical traditions that formed her: partly the music of her homeland, partly Western classical music. She describes the concert as “a portrait of Latin America in all its glory”, a world of boundless energy, exquisite beauty and deep tensions.

However, this is not a piece characterised by a shallow varnish of authenticity, it is more complex than it first appears, each movement holds darker meanings. Montero describes Latin America’s multifaceted, often contradictory, character, ranging from rhythmic, life-affirming vivacity to its frighteningly demonic, concealed aspects. There are even, according to Montero, examples of black magic: “A symbolic reminder of the evil forces that all too often in various guises hold our continent to ransom.”

The form is traditional with three, formal, movements, fast-slow-fast. Underneath it all, Montero skilfully weaves in multiple Latin American rhythms with a Western idiom. She is strongly influenced by the music of George Gershwin, especially in the first movement, a mambo. The last movement, interestingly indicated as allegro venezolano, also has a local flavour. Her music is influenced by the pajarillo, a traditional Venezuelan dance. The slow second movement, the andante moderato, is more Western in character and clearly reminiscent of Sergei Rachmaninov.

The work is broad in scope with an almost twelve-minute-long first movement, the slow movement is almost as long. The music is engaging and full of sudden turns of phrase, rhythms and coloration. It is remarkably easy on the ear, especially considering it is a contemporary piece.

Text: Andreas Konvicka
Intermission

20 min
LUDWIG VAN BEETHOVEN: Symphony no. 7 in A-major Op. 92

40 min

I. Poco sostenuto – Vivace
II. Allegretto
III. Presto
IV. Allegro con brio

Beethoven composed his seventh symphony in A-major (1811) during a period of economic hardship and illness, but none of this is reflected in his music – no struggle, dark moods or dramatic conflict. On the contrary, the music is light and airy, and the rhythm is dynamic throughout. It appears that a stay at the Bohemian spa of Teplitz benefited Beethoven greatly.

The first movement opens with a long, slow introduction. The pace picks up, followed by a punctuated, dance-like rhythm that not only continues throughout the movement. It informs other motifs throughout the symphony.

The second movement can be considered a stately pavane, going back to the Renaissance. The mood is more subdued than in the first movement, and an elegiac melody is carried by the viola and cello parts. As a result, the piece has been interpreted as a funeral march, or even as a sign of world-weariness. The fact that Beethoven often performed music indicated as allegretto (rather fast) more like a slow adagio has probably amplified this idea. The movement is probably one of the composer’s best known compositions. It was popular even in his lifetime.

The fast scherzo-like third movement is intentionally rhythmic with a whirling energy including appoggiatura and trills. The interludes have a folkloric theme, until the ecstatic, majestic finale brings the symphony to its conclusion. Beethoven’s works from this period often refer to, or even borrow passages from, French revolutionary music. It was widely known at the time, but essentially forgotten today. At the end of the finale is a reference to the divertissement Le Triomphe de la république (1793). This military-style overture, with its shrill trumpet fanfares and pounding drums, but also the choral works Dieu du people and Malheur au despotisme, allude to this type of French revolutionary music, which Beethoven deliberately included in his compositions.

Text: Andreas Konvicka

About the concert

Over the last few years, highly acclaimed composer Mats Larsson Gothe has had many major successes, not least with several works for the stage, most recently the opera Löftet (The Promise) at the Royal Swedish Opera. His work within this genre informs his later orchestral works, which are more danceable than earlier compositions. Gothe’s Symphony No. 4 (2022–2023), performed for the first time during the Baltic Sea Festival, was commissioned by and is dedicated to the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra. According to Gothe, this is music about life and death, but with moments of beauty. The subtitle, “… out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope,” is a quote from Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech. It sums up the symphony’s central theme.

In her Piano Concerto No. 1, “Latin Concerto”, the Venezuelan pianist and composer Gabriela Montero celebrates the spirit of the peoples of South America. It reflects on, and takes the pulse of, the entire continent, both its dark and light aspects. This music includes all the dance rhythms associated with Latin America together with a great deal of charm and sensuality – but all that glitters is not gold; the complex music is not simply superficial entertainment. It reflects Montero’s childhood and training in the United States, and as a result, the work is a combination of Latin American and western classical music. It is clearly inspired by the music of Rachmaninov and Gershwin.

Ludwig van Beethoven’s Symphony No. 7 (1811) was first performed on 8 December 1813 during a charity concert for wounded soldiers, together with his orchestral piece Wellington’s Victory (“Battle Symphony”), celebrating the victory over Napoleon’s forces. The concert, arranged by his contemporary, Johann Nepomuk Mälzel, inventor of the metronome, was held in front of an audience of 5 000. It was Beethoven’s greatest lifetime achievement. Mälzel had a talent for persuading several major musicians and singers to participate in the concert, which contributed to its success. While the “Battle Symphony” was most popular, the seventh symphony received great acclaim too. Both works were for a long time associated with one another, but it is unlikely it was Beethoven’s intention. Work on the seventh symphony was after all completed long before Wellington’s troops won the Battle of Vitoria in June 1813.

Beethoven called the symphony his “most excellent symphony”. It was performed on three more occasions within two and a half months of the premiere. It remains one of his most popular and most often performed, a standard repertoire item, owing to its danceable, cheerful mood, rich melodics and spontaneity.

Text: Andreas Konvicka

Watch Gabriela Montero’s Incredible Improvisations During the Concert