Fragile Hope
Italian premiere performance

Despite a population that does not match that of Bologna, Iceland is now one of the most vibrant countries on the world music scene, as evidenced by the recent Academy Award given to Hildur Gudnadottir for the score of the film Joker. Daníel Bjarnason (1979) is himself one of contemporary Iceland’s leading voices, both as a composer and conductor. In the 2023-24 season, the Gothenburg Symphony premiered A Fragile Hope, a piece in a series of pieces commissioned from leading Scandinavian area composers with the aim of highlighting the vulnerability of marine life. The musical language is linked to personal memories, imbued with the natural suggestions of a unique country suspended between water and fire.  

Concerto for violin and orchestra
First Italian performance

Commissioned by the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the Iceland Symphony Orchestra, Bjarnason’s Violin Concerto “Scordatura” saw the light of day in 2017 under the baton of Gustavo Dudamel. The title evokes the unconventional tuning of the violin, which is called to very daring technical solutions, between very fast broken chords and hyper-virtuosic cadences that enhance the instrument’s timbral palette to the extreme limit of its lowest notes. Bjarnason articulates Scordatura in a single organic movement, lasting 25 minutes. Since its first performance, with Pekka Kuusisto as soloist, the piece has been an immediate success, establishing itself in the repertoire of new music of the 21st century.

Peter Grimes: Passacaglia

Peter Grimes, Benjamin Britten’s first theatrical success in 1945, tells the tragic story of a lonely fisherman struggling with an asphyxiated community that fears and condemns him by trusting prejudice. At the center is the conflict between the individual and public opinion, between ambiguous truths and entrenched conformity. With music ranging from poignant lyricism to darker dramatic tension, Britten paints a complex protagonist in a ruthless social environment, turning a personal drama into a universal reflection on intolerance. From the score the composer expunged several symphonic pieces-the Four Sea Interludes and the Passacaglia-that condense Grimes’ tragic screwing around. In these pieces, nature takes the place of the protagonist, declaring itself as a force close to, but indifferent to, man’s fate.

Symphony No. 7 in C major op. 105

In 1904 Bologna was the first Italian square to perform music by Sibelius. Since that concert, conducted by Arturo Toscanini, the city has maintained a constant link with the greatest Finnish composer, capable of speaking a solipsistic yet universal language. The Seventh, completed in 1924, concludes his symphonic journey, just before a creative silence that lasted nearly 30 years, until his death. In this “Symphonic Fantasy,” as Sibelius himself baptized it after nearly six years of work, one finds the superb and enigmatic atmospheres of his poetics, with a freedom of writing that no longer bothers to scan individual movements, but creates a single expanding arc. His swan song.