The local pastry shop in Halmstad, sweden, stood in the autumn his hometown Tommie Haglund-festival with its own cake. When his Tonsättarweekend at the Stockholm concert hall took in Thursday got the audience to settle with the ear candy. Including the premiere of the composer’s first symphony. A type of work he never intended to write, but now written in its own way. For Haglunds composing is deeply linked with the right literature. It is from there that he borrows, not only the titles, but many times even the shape.
As in the ”Hymn an die Nacht”, a symphonic poem for violin and orchestra named after Novalis diktsvit. This will be the soloist to the subject, which seem to howl in the musically harsh moonlight. It begins abruptly with a long solokadens, a irritated or maybe moonstruck monologue marked by the roughness and dubbelgrepp. Especially that soloist Ilya Gringolts skimp a little with the sensual heat. So begins the paragraph several times until the day dawns and vargtimmen changes to a more elegiac calm.
seem outdated when, in the uppsnacket hear him speak about everything from naturfilosofen Swedenborg to Plato’s Diotima-figure in terms of wisdom and female intuition. But Haglund is a modern romantics, whose music always has its own, very human logic. Öppningsstycket ”Serenata per Diotima” for strings (with a nicely executed solo part of the evening’s concertmaster Seohee Min) begins almost with a sob, a pizzicato in the kontrabasarna who was gasping for air. But if a tear fell, it would reproduce themselves like small, small ripples in the enchanting mirror surface of a lake, probably southern india, in clear and obscure at the same time.
It sounds like a last senromantisk sigh, but at the same time ”a kind of sensual pleasure in the present moment”, to borrow the Haglunds own words about the model of Frederick Delius dreamy music from the programme. By this Delius may we also ”Intermezzo” from the tablåoperan ”Fennimore and Gerda”. And probably, you will hear a kinship between the Haglunds vibrant tonality and the brittleness of the kosmopolitiske britten. Something that goes again after the pause in ”La rosa profunda” for soprano and orchestra. With a text by the argentinean writer Jorge Luis Borges, it is about life’s fragility, regarded by the rose’s transience. It becomes a sensuous, shimmering music, heartfelt version of the soprano Miah Persson under the direction of Tobias Ringborg.
large S and the shape of the single statement. The work dedicated to Claes-Göran Bjerding, Haglunds first teacher at the municipal music school in Kalmar, sweden, who encouraged tonsättarvalpens dreams about writing Mozartmusik. The news of Bjerdings death provided the impetus for the composition of the Royal Philharmonic commissioned. Solistiska motif appears and disappears in an ever-changing, but something static, ongoing music with trembling strings and traits of Schoenberg’s psychoanalytic forest trails. Wondrous, but less ångestridet than a modern musical spiritual adviser as Anders Eliasson. Almost fifty minutes is the longest the team, but the structure has its clear points. Without warning, everything is over – just like life itself.
Tonsättarweekend continues on Saturday with Haglunds ”Symphony” in the replay and the cello concerto ”Flaminis aura”, and on Sunday with chamber music.
