Programme
- Let Me Cry(11 mins)
- Considering Icarus for trombone and orchestra(20 mins)
- interval
- The Fact of the Matter(16 mins)
- Voyages Extraordinaries(32 mins)
Performers
- Stephen Menottitrombone
- Emilia Hovingconductor
About this Concert
Britta Byström’s Voyages extraordinaires was inspired by the enchanting (and impossible) journeys depicted in Jules Verne’s famous novel series. Her own work is intended as a fantastical musical journey on which the listener encounters new worlds of sound through recurring orchestral transformations. So, bring a thirst for discovery to the 2024 Nordic Music Days festival – this year in Glasgow – which celebrates contemporary music and sounds from Scotland and the Nordic region.
Just as all great journeys have a story to tell, so too does Handel’s 1711 aria Let me cry, in which the captured Almirena is on her own quest for freedom. Eli Tausen á Lava describes his reimagination of Handel’s music as like “the sand dunes of the Sahara being gently sculpted by the desert winds”. In her concerto for trombone and orchestra, Maja S.K. Ratkje reflects on the beauty of Icarus’s overwhelming attempt to reach for the impossible. And we bask in the elemental sonorities of Icelandic composer Hildur Guðnadóttir – the extraordinary, Academy Award-winning musical imagination behind Joker and Chernobyl.