Welcome back to the blog! So I say both to you and, I suppose, also to myself. As of writing this first post of the season, I am slowly reemerging at the far end of this year’s Baltic Sea Festival in Berwaldhallen. Nine days of concerts, talks, and other inspiring experiences delivered to packs of concertgoers by Emma Nyberg, double bassist-turned-festival manager, and her colleagues.
Among my personal highlights was the sophomore edition of the Baltic Sea Festival Science Lab: A merger of new music and science, not so much a regular concert as a series of through-composed scientific presentations on a variety of topics. Six pairs – one composer and one researcher – teamed up to create a 15-minute-long piece each, where the music supports what was essentially an oral presentation of the research in question.
The entire performance is available through September 2024 to watch on Berwaldhallen Play. I highly recommend it.
Another tremendous experience was Venezuelan pianist-composer Gabriela Montero, who together with conductor Marta Gardolińska and the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra closed the festival with a concert featuring Montero playing her own Latin Concerto and piano quintet Canaima. She composed the latter last year and premiered it only a few months ago.
Not only were Montero’s pieces interesting and rewarding, but she was also a formidable pianist with technical and artistic skill combined with genuine warmth and openness toward the orchestra and the audience. In her review for Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter, Johanna Paulsson described her as a “radiant […] politically engaged pianist and composer” who “doesn’t shy away from highlighting her homeland’s political situation”. “It is hard”, Paulsson wrote, “not to fall slightly in love with her style: easy, inviting, and vivacious.”
Paulsson also mentions Gabriela Montero’s improvisational skills. Throughout the evening, she took three requests from the audience for melodies to improvise on. The first time, a cheeky person in the balcony started singing the Swedish drinking song Helan går, eliciting laughter from everyone (including the orchestra). Concertmaster Malin Broman explained the joke to an initially puzzled, then clearly amused Montero, even playing it once more for her. Then Montero set off on a vibrant, several minutes long improvisation, putting our well-known but humble drinking song in an entirely new light.
Later on, yours truly was first at bat with the classic Swedish folk song Uti vår hage. I sung the first phrase – “Uti vår hage, där växa blå bär” – at which point the audience responded, as if through Pavlovian conditioning, with the response – “Kom hjärtansfröjd!” Our soloist exclaimed with admiration as the audience continued to sing the rest of the first verse to her. Montero responded at the grand piano with an improvisation laden with Romantic fervour, at times bringing an angst-ridden Schumann to mind.
Casually dismissing someone’s suggestion of John Lennon’s Imagine as the third melody, Gabriela Montero instead picked up on ABBA’s Dancing Queen, giving us a taste of what I imagine Chopin might have made of the chorus’ main hook. Montero then finished the entire evening – which had at that point stretched way past the live radio broadcast – with an improvisation all her own, which she dedicated to “the freedom of Venezuela”. Taking her final bows of the evening, she was visibly moved almost to tears by the intimate connection she inspired with the audience, and I am certain she wasn’t the only one who felt that way.
I don’t know how many knew of Gabriela Montero before, but I am willing to bet that she got a number of new fans that night. Berwaldhallen clipped the Uti vår hage improvisation and shared it online, on various social media but also on YouTube:
Looking back on the festival, the more intimate experiences moved me the most and will probably stay with me the longest. Modest Mussorgsky’s opera Khovanshchina, a dramatic retelling of a part of Russia’s bloody and violent history of civil war, was both potent and portentous, reminding us that time is a flat circle and how humanity seems doomed to its worst tendencies. Superstars Yuja Wang and Esa-Pekka Salonen kickstarted last week with another jam-packed programme, much like Gardolińska and Montero ended it with, including Sibelius’ beloved Lemminkäinen Suite.
But the earnest wonder in researcher Robin Bonné’s description of his beloved cable bacteria, or the horrific contemporary context of Juhi Bansal’s settings of texts by anonymous Afghan women poets – brilliantly performed by Kathrin Lorenzen with Oskar Ekberg and Anna Garde – resonated with me in a more profound way. And when British-Ukrainian conductor and violist Maxim Rysanov led a chamber orchestra with members of both the Swedish and Ukrainian Radio Symphony Orchestras in Myroslav Skoryk’s Melody, I ended up actually crying in my seat.
It’s easy to dismiss Melody as superficially banal, predictable and sentimental. But I also believe that the simplicity and directness of it made it a suitable vessel for what Rysanov and the ensemble projected, the raw emotion that especially Rysanov clearly harbours about the atrocities tearing his homeland to shreds. A more complex and demanding piece would perhaps have been more intellectually stimulating, but probably not as immediate or sincere. There is, I would argue, a time and a place for both.