A Northern Lights Festival in Detroit

Yesterday evening the Detroit Symphony Orchestra presented its latest live-streamed performance. Once again, due to the shift in time zones, my wife and I settled down to dinner while viewing the concert through the YouTube app on our living room television set. The title of the program was Northern Lights Festival, presenting three Scandinavian composers. The ensemble was led by Principal Guest Conductor Tabita Berglund.

The first of those composers was Einojuhani Rautavaara. “Cantus Arcticus” is also known as “Concerto for Birds and Orchestra,” since the full forces of the orchestral ensemble are augmented with recordings of birdsong. (The composer’s source was the sound-effects collection of Finnish Radio.) There was no questioning the uniqueness of sonorities in the interplay of the birdsongs with the instrumental sonorities. Nevertheless, it did not take the composer long for establishing that interplay in the mind of the attentive listener. After that, the composition began to overstay its welcome for a duration that gradually became intolerable.

Johan Dalene, violin soloist for the performance of the Sibelius violin concerto conducted by Tabita Berglund (screen shot from last night’s YouTube’s video feed of the performance)

Fortunately, the composer Jean Sibelius (who died in 1957 at the ripe old age of 91) had a much better command when it came to sustaining attention. His D minor violin concerto was completed in 1904 with subsequent revisions in 1905. The music is particularly demanding on the soloist, but Johan Dalene brought a freshness to this music that has received a lot of attention from a lot of violinists.

The second half of the program was devoted entirely to music that Edvard Grieg composed for Henrik Ibsen’s verse-play Peer Gynt. The play is in five acts, and Grieg’s original score consisted of 26 movements. Berglund began with the prelude music for the first act, given the title “At the Wedding.” This was followed by the two suites extracted from the full score, played in reverse order with the four movements of Opus 55 preceding the four in Opus 46. For many, this meant that the final selection was the most familiar.

The United States is a significant distance from Scandinavia, but yesterday’s live-streamed performance definitely established a “meeting of two worlds!”