Photo: Marie Lundgren
Norrbotten NEO: The Lullabie of the Night
NOTE: Online ticket sales close 1 hour before the concert begins. Tickets can then be bought at the door on the venue.
If you buy a day ticket, you also get access to the concert: Open Form / Jonas Frølund: Solo Clarinet
The Swedish chamber ensemble Norrbotten NEO, along with the conductor B. Tommy Andersson and the soprano Alexandra Büchel, presents a musical exploration of the sensorial. Listening to music is always a sensorial experience, but Norrbotten NEO's concert is based to a unique degree on works that, in their own way, revolve around the very act of sensing the world.
Take, for example, Karin Rehnqvist's Music in the Night, which is specifically inspired by the way our senses are sharpened at night: sound is perceived as stronger, light sharper. This phenomenon is integral to Music in the night: the sound is warm and dark, the contrasts fluid, the nuances indistinct, but if you tune your hearing to night and allow your senses to open, the work will follow suit and open as well. The intense sensorial experience of the night is also at work in Christian Winther Christensen's Nachtmusik: In the winter night's impenetrable silence and heavy snow, he has found inspiration for his explosive, Mozart-inspired "sturm und drang".
And take Britta Byström's Alphabet – written specifically for Norrbotten NEO and Büchel – which is based on Inger Christensen's cycle of poems by the same name: poems in which the very act of perceiving the world is rendered as a systematic, almost scientific practice. Byström has been inspired by Christensen's systems – the lengths of the movements are controlled by the Fibonacci series and the pitches by the alphabet – but especially, perhaps, by the way Christensen looks at the world: The way she, in Byström's words, envisions the overwhelming beauty of the world as a magic against anything that threatens it. Hans Abrahamsen, who is behind Two Inger Christensen Songs, also emphasizes Christensen's perceptive gaze: the first song evokes the feeling of timelessness you experience when you look at the clouds and the sun and feel one with all of nature; the second song is a terrifying vision of a desolate and lifeless world.
Program
Britta Byström: Alfabet [Alphabet] (2020) (excerpts)
Hans Abrahamsen: Two Inger Christensen Songs (2016)
Christian Winter Christensen: Nachtmusik (2011)
Karin Rehnqvist: Musik i natten [Music in the night] (2021)
Duration ca. 60 min.
Biographies
Norrbotten NEO
Britta Byström
Hans Abrahamsen
Christian Winther Christensen
Karin Rehnqvist