Celebrating 30 years: Göteborg Opera presents the first performance of Verdi's Otello in Gothenburg for over 50 years, and a very Swedish Peter Grimes

Göteborg Opera is celebrating its 30th anniversary this year. Founded in 1994, the company, which won the award for Sustainability at the International Opera Awards 2022, strives to be efficient in all its operations when working with finite and renewable resources. Its celebratory 2024/25 season includes new productions of Verdi's Otello and Britten's Peter Grimes, along with performances of Puccini's Madama Butterfly, a double bill of Mozart’s Der Schauspieldirektor and Tchaikovsky’s Iolanta, and Bizet’s Carmen and Puccini’s Tosca.

Verdi's Otello, receiving its first staging in Gothenburg for 55 years, will be directed by the Spanish director Rafael R. Villalobos and conducted by Vincenzo Milletarì, but features a very Swedish cast, with Swedish Court singer Michael Weinius making his role debut as Otello, his dream role, which made him want to become an opera singer as a young boy at the Royal Opera in Stockholm, Gothenburg-born Julia Sporsén as Desdemona and Jens Søndergaard as Iago.

Perhaps, even more intriguingly, Britten's Peter Grimes is being performed by a largely non-Anglophone cast, a fact that signals not only the international acceptance of the opera but will bring different perspectives to the performance. British director Netia Jones's production is inspired by the Swedish West coast and features Joachim Bäckström in the title role with Matilda Sterby as Ellen and Åke Zetterström as Balstrode. Distinguished mezzo-soprano Katarina Karnéus features as Auntie. The conductor is Christoph Gedschold, music director of Oper Leipzig.

The revival of Yoshi Oïda's 2016 production of Puccini's Madama Butterfly features the 1904 Brescia version of the opera. This was Puccini's first revision, made after the unsuccessful premiere. This was the first version to divide the opera into three acts, but this version is less revised than the final version and more openly condemnatory of colonialism and exoticism.

Full details of Göteborg Opera's season from the company's website.

Herr Arnes penningar: Göteborg Opera revives rarely performed opera by 20th century Swedish composer Gösta Nystroem

Swedish composer Gösta Nystroem (1890-1966) studied composition in Stockholm, Copenhagen and Paris, and in Paris his teachers included Vincent D'Indy and Leonid Sabanayev. Nystroem is not a well-known name today, though in the 1930s his music was regarded as modernist in Sweden.

In 1959 his opera Herr Arnes penningar (Mr Arne's Money) was created as a radio play and first staged in 1961 in Gothenberg, where Nystroem lived for most of his life after his return from Paris. In 2017, Göteborg Opera gave a concert performance of the opera which received critical acclaim and now the company is planning to stage it in 2022 as part of the city's 400th anniversary celebrations.

Herr Arnes penningar is based on Swedish writer Selma Lagerlöf's novel of the same name, dating from 1904. Lagerlöf was the first woman to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, and the novel tells a somewhat macabre story, a riveting tale of murder, stolen treasure and ill-fated love set in the bleak and supernatural wintery landscape of the medieval Gothenburg region.

Nystroem's output includes six symphonies, concertos, chamber music and songs, but Herr Arnes penningar seems to be his only opera.

The production will be directed by Mattias Ermedahl and conducted by Patrik Ringborg with a cast including Julia Sporsen, and it debuts on 19 February 2022. Full details from the Göteborg Opera website.

Still encouraging us to listen in new ways: O/Modernt Festival celebrates its 10th anniversary with a festival live and on-line

Hugo Ticciati and O/Modernt at Confidencen, Ulriksdal Palace, Stockholm

O/Modernt Festival 2021 at Confidencen, Ulriksdal Palace, Stockholm
Reviewed by Robert Hugill on 20 June 2021
O/Modernt is 10 and celebrated with a festival bringing together old and new in typically (un)familiar ways

This year we celebrate anniversaries for Josquin, Stravinsky and Miles Davies though I suspect few festivals will manage to slip all three into the same programme. It says much about the ethos of Hugo Ticciati's O/Modernt Festival based at the 18th century theatre, Confidencen, at Ulriksdal Palace in Stockholm that for their concert on 15 June 2021 as part of this year's O/Modernt Festival, Ticciati and his orchestra along with jazz pianist and composer Gwilym Simcock created a programme which moved easily between all three composers, beginning with Josquin's Ave Maria .... virgo serena and ending with Simcock's arrangement of selections from Miles Davies' Live-Evil whilst along the way taking in Stravinsky's Three pieces for string quartet and Concerto in D (‘Basle’).

The festival this year ran from 11 to 16 June 2021 and whilst the concerts had a small audience at Confidencen they are also available on-line for 30 days through takt1 and I was able to catch up with a selection of music from the festival. This year is O/Modernt's 10th anniversary and essential Ticciati's programmes for the festival celebrated the festival's ethos which embodies Ticciati's ideas. He feels we need to listen with new ears and that juxtaposing different styles of music, there being no correct style so that for the opening concert we even had a new piece combining the music of Beethoven and David Bowie!

Confidencen, Ulriksdal Palace, Stockholm

The opening concert was on 11 June 2021 and titled Inventing the past. The first half was a journey around Bach whilst for the second Beethoven became the focus, though in surprisingly different ways. The ensemble combined the players from O/Modernt with young players from O/Modernt New Generation Artists. We began with Bach's Brandenburg Concerto No. 3 in a vivid performance where it was clear that the players were having a great time. These are modern instruments but very present and full of colours. For the middle movement, just two notes, we had a very 21st century improvisation featuring an electric guitar. 

Circus Days and Nights: Philip Glass' opera based on Robert Lax's circus poems to premiere in Malmö

Philip Glass: Circus Days And Nights
(Image Peter Aberg / Photo Karo)

American poet Robert Lax (1915-2000) was fascinated by the circus and during the 1940s worked in circuses in Canada as a clown and expert juggler. It was travelling with the Cristiani Brothers circus in 1949 that enabled him to generate material for his long poems The Circus of the Sun and Mogador's Book. [There is some film footage of Cristiani Brothers' circus on the Robert Lax website]. The Circus of the Sun is a cycle of 31 short poems which tells a day in the life of a travelling circus, aligning events with the canonical hours. 

Composer Philip Glass had long been fascinated by Lax's circus poetry and for the last ten years has had the rights to Lax's circus poem. But it is only now that Glass has ventured into putting his vision of Lax's poetic world into practice, thanks to an innovative Swedish director.

Tilde Björfors, who is renowned for incorporating circus acts into traditional theatre, is the founder and Artistic Director of the Swedish company Cirkus Cirkör. In 2016 she directed a production of Philip Glass' Satyagraha at Folkoperan, Stockholm which was a collaboration between Folkoperan and Cirkus Cirkör which was a spectacular mix of opera and circus. It was seeing Björfors' production of Satyagraha that convinced Glass that he had found his circus for his work based on Lax's poetry.

Circus Days and Nights will feature a libretto by David Henry Hwang based on Lax's circus poetry, and will be staged as a collaboration between Cirkus Cirkör and Malmö Opera, directed by Tilde Björfors. The new opera will take audiences on a spectacular adventure into the world of the circus and the performers who dedicate their lives to this art, capturing a day in their lives as a spiritual ceremony, one which honours the cycle of life and death. The show will be performed on Malmö Opera’s main stage with live music to an intimate socially distanced live audience and streamed worldwide, and the cast will include soprano Elin Rombo who recently sang the title role in Rufus Wainwright's opera Prima Donna at Royal Swedish Opera.

The opera will be streamed on-line from 29 May to 13 June 2021, full details from the opera website.

Young composers in Sweden, Manchester and Denmark: O/Modernt, Manchester International Festival and BBC Philharmonic

Paul Saggers

The Swedish O/Modernt festival, artistic director Hugo Ticciati, has announced the winner of the 2021 iteration of its annual Composition Award. This year's competition was staged in collaboration with the Manchester International Festival, the Manchester Camerata, specialist music school Lilla Akademien and DUEN – The Danish Youth Ensemble. The winning work will be premiered at the Manchester International Festival on 16 July 2021, at a site-specific concert The Patience of Trees when Hugo Ticciati conducts the Manchester Camerata in a programme which will also include the premiere of a new piece by Dobrinka Tabakova. There will then be performances of the winning work in Sweden and Denmark during the 2021/22 season. 

First prize went to British composer Paul Saggers and his composition Vulpes Vulpes for string orchestra and percussion. The title is the binomial name of the red fox, and the work depicts the challenges the animal faces in rural and urban environments. Saggers started playing the cornet at the age of 12, and at the age of 25 he decided to pursue a career in the Royal Marines Band Service and is currently based in the Plymouth Band, and in 2019 completed an MMus in Composition through the Royal Marines in partnership with Plymouth University where he was tutored by Simon Dobson.

A Special Distinction from O/Modernt has been awarded to Todo Era Vuelo En Nuestra Tierra by Argentinian composer Julieta Szewach.  

Full details of the competition from the O/Modernt website, and details of the premiere from Manchester International Festival's website.

Tom Could (Photo: Timothy Lutton)

The British composer Tom Coult has been appointed as the BBC Philharmonic’s Composer in Association, starting in Autumn 2021 with the premiere of his first commission Pleasure Garden. In his new role, Coult will compose three new scores for the BBC Philharmonic. His appointment builds on an existing creative relationship with the orchestra, including Sonnet Machine in 2016 which was commissioned by the BBC Philharmonic and premiered at Bridgewater Hall in Manchester, and Rainbow-Shooting Cloud Contraption which was first broadcast in March on BBC Radio 3.

Coult's St John’s Dance was premiered by Edward Gardner and the BBC Symphony Orchestra to open the First Night of the 2017 BBC Proms, and his chamber opera Violet, to a text by Alice Birch, will premiere at the 2022 Aldeburgh Festival. Coult studied at the University of Manchester with Camden Reeves and Philip Grange and at King’s College London with George Benjamin. Between 2017 and 2019 he was Visiting Fellow Commoner in the Creative Arts at Trinity College Cambridge, and has taught on the Britten Sinfonia Academy composition course and with Aldeburgh Young Musicians.

Coult commented, "I love writing for orchestra – I think of writing music as playing with toys, and the orchestra is the biggest box of toys there is. In the last year I’ve wondered whether that extravagant box of toys will ever be open to anyone again, so it’s an almost unimaginable luxury to be thinking about orchestral music for the next few years. I honestly can’t wait to work more with the extraordinary musicians of the BBC Philharmonic – I’m enormously lucky."

Full details from the BBC Philharmonic's website, and Coult recently created a programme of Baroque arrangements for the orchestra which is available on BBC Sounds.