Baltic Festival 2007: Cruising With the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra 28.8 and 30.8.2007 (GF)

 

This year the Baltic Festival celebrated 5 years,  but the embryo was a light June evening in St Petersburg when the director of Berwaldhallen in Stockholm, Mikael Tydén and conductors Esa-Pekka Salonen and Valery Gergiev were on a boat trip on the river Neva, eating, drinking and discussing ideas concerning a music collaboration around the Baltic Sea. This was in 1999 and gradually the ideas developed but it was not until 2003 that the project was launched. It has become increasingly popular and this year’s festival saw orchestras and choirs from all around the Baltic Sea, including the Oslo Philharmonic. For the third year in a row Silja Line arranged cruises with participating orchestras and I heard two concerts with the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra on their way to and from Helsinki, where they gave a guest appearance in the Helsinki Festival (see separate review)  with which the Baltic Festival overlaps. The concerts were given in Atlantis Palace, the dance palace on Silja Serenade and Silja Symphony, suitable names for this purpose. A dance hall doesn’t exactly have acoustics that make classical musicians happy but due to skilful but discreet amplification the result was very satisfying.

Besides these hour-long concerts, several small groups of musicians gave mini concerts in the Promenade. I heard a string quartet – playing among other things the Rolling Stones! – a wind quintet and a quartet of French horns. Mostly light and entertaining music it was but far from meek – enticing rhythms and daring harmonies were the order of the day.

The official concerts were played by a reduced orchestra – the dance floor was packed with musicians even so – and the conductor was Niklas Willén, well known from numerous recordings of Swedish music on Naxos. He was also a humoristic and charming moderator of the evening. The programme was mainly Nordic and of the light music and popular classics kind but they opened with the overture to Le nozze di Figaro and rounded off with another overture, the one to Berwald’s Estrella de Soria. In between we were served a mixed salad, much of it for strings: a movement from Grieg’s Holberg Suite, a five movement suite, Pelimannit, by Rautavaara, vital and thrilling in turns, built on fiddlers’ tunes. This was actually Rautavaara’s opus one and we also got the beautiful intermezzo from Nielsen’s first opus, the suite for strings. Two soloists were also launched, both from the ranks of the orchestra. Kjell-Inge Stevensson played the beautiful slow movement of Crusell’s Clarinet Concerto in F minor and the leader – or as we call him in Scandinavia, concert master – Bernt Lysell gave a virtuoso reading of Sibelius Humoresque in D minor. A couple of titles from the light entertainment repertoire were also performed. Sten Karlberg’s Sommar, sommar, sommar – yes it means what it looks like, and practically every person who has been in Sweden in the summertime and turned on a radio must have heard it since it has been the title music for a programme series that has been running for around fifty years by now. Bobby Eriksson, an amateur composer, wrote a couple of winning songs for the Swedish branch of the European Song Contest but also Utskärgård, an orchestral piece inspired by the outer islands and skerries of the Stockholm archipelago. Maestro Willén had programmed it as late as possible to be sure that we were at least not too far from those skerries.

Encores followed of course. Hugo Alfvén’s virtuoso The Herdsmaid’s Dance from the ballet The Mountain King and Lumbye’s festive Champagne Galop with Niklas Willén not only conducting but also firing champagne corks with great relish.

On the return voyage the same programme was played with the difference that Rautavaara was exchanged for Bo Nilsson’s Arctic Air, a beautiful piece with a little surprise twist in the tail. The orchestra were in high spirits and the playing on a constantly high level. I hope this tradition will continue.

 

Göran Forsling

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