It is with great excitement we announce that Ensemble Allegria will be visiting Cartagena Music Festival, Colombia in January 2024. With a total of six main concerts in beatiful venues in the historic city of Cartagena, we will bring the music of Grieg, Sibelius, Svendsen, Nielsen and other nordic composers to the shores of the Caribbean ocean. Together with violinist Eldbjørg Hemsing, mezzosoprano Marianne Beate Kielland and pianist Olli Mustonen, we represent the nordic musical community in one of Latin-America’s biggest classical music festivals.
HOLBERG: AN ALMOST NEO-CLASSICAL SUITE
Adolfo Meija Theatre - Cartagena, Colombia
Grieg contributed significantly to the recognition and dissemination of Norwegian folk music in Europe. In his music, the composer managed to express the most intimate feelings with freshness of images and naturalness of harmonic language. This sense almost predicted, at times, certain modern musical solutions and tendencies, especially impressionistic and neoclassical. In the case of the Holberg Suite in which the neoclassical tendency is evident.
ARTISTS
Eldbjørg Hemsing, violin
Santiago Cañón Valencia, cello
Ingar Bergby, conductor
Ensemble Allegria
Program
Antonio Vivaldi (1678-1741)
Concerto No. 2 in G minor, Op. 8, RV 315, "Summer"
Franz Joseph Haydn (1732-1809)
Cello Concerto No. 1 in C major, Hob. VIIb/1
—INTERMISSION—
Edvard Grieg (1843-1907)
Holberg Suite, op. 40
Johan Svendsen (1840-1911)
Norwegian Rhapsody No.1, Op.17
Cartagena Music Festival theme 2024 - Symphony of nature
Myths, landscapes, national identity and modernity in the music of Northern Europe in the 19th and early 20th centuries
The choosing of the theme of this edition of the Festival, Symphony of the Nature, pretends to highlight through its programming the main elements of the important musical phenomenon that developed in some countries of northern Europe and that had a huge cultural, social and political transcendence in almost every scandinavian country. In those countries, the emergence of nationalist tendencies coincided with the exceptional cultural and musical blooming that produced pieces of absolute value, master works extremely important in the history of western music.
The programming nodal point is the Sweden, Norway, Iceland, Denmark, and Finland’s music of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th. It will constitute the thread that will help us to capture the affirmation of national characteristics in the production of many important composers, such as Edvard Grieg (Norway), Franz Berwald (Sweden), Carl Nielsen (Denmark), Sveinbjörn Sveinbjörnson (Iceland); Jean Sibelius (Finland), among others.