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.
THE VIOLIN: THE VOICE OF SIBELIUS
Adolfo Meija Theatre - Cartagena, Colombia
Sibelius, with his Humoresque Op. 87 and Op. 89 was faced with the need to reconcile two factors that were difficult to reconcile; on the one hand, the long and illustrious tradition of the Romanticism, in which virtuosity had to find its proper space; on the other, his personal compositional style, in which the idea of neo-primitivism, of sobriety and depth of thought, reflected a claim of cultural identity for Finland. However, the Sibelius Humoresque moves in a substantial balance between these two components, with thematic material of an unmistakably Sibeliusian Nordic atmosphere and with a very demanding violin writing, which establishes a relationship of intimate solidarity with the orchestral team.
ARTISTS
Nikita Boriso-Glebsky, violin
Ingar Bergby, conductor
Ensemble Allegria
Program
Antonio Vivaldi (1678-1741)
Concerto No. 4 in F minor, Op. 8, RV 297, "Winter"
Kurt Atterberg (1887-1974)
Intermezzo for String Orchestra
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791)
Serenade No. 13 for strings in G major, K. 525 “Eine Kleine Nacht Musik”
—INTERMISSION—
Jean Sibelius (1865-1957)
Andante festivo, Op. 117a
Suite Champetre, op. 98b
Humoresques, op. 87
Humoresques, op. 89
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.