Alvin Vikman and Carl Unander-Scharin at the Baltic Sea Festival
The world premiere of Alvin Vikman's Japanese North Sea joins Carl Unander-Scharin's virtuoso and technically intensive Calligrammes at Krista Audere's debut concert as First Guest Conductor of the Swedish Radio Choir, Saturday 6 September in Berwaldhallen.
The Calligrammes choral suite has taken its title and inspiration from the surrealist poet Guillaume Apollinaire, whose poems of the same name were printed typographically in the form of what the poem was about. Carl Unander-Scharin has been inspired to transfer this visual representation into music. On stage, the Radio Choir brings a series of motion-sensitive ropes, stretched like a human's vocal cords. The ropes contain music, sound and voices, and by leaning against and pressing on these, the singers can play on the ropes. Quotes from Apollinaire's verses are heard, which together with the singing and choreography by Åsa Unander-Scharin portray the surrealist texts. In this way, the choir's movements become part of the music, and the choir part of the instrument. Carl Unander-Scharin is the tenor soloist in his own work and the dancer Arina Trostyanetskaya also interacts with the technology in this Gesamtkunstwerk.
Alvin Vikman (b. 2001) is a new star in the Swedish composers' firmament. Despite his young age, Vikman has already collaborated with the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra, the Stockholm Cathedral Chamber Choir and the Erik Westberg Vocal Ensemble. For the Baltic Sea Festival, he has composed the work North Sea , which the Radio Choir will premiere in Berwaldhallen.
Vikman has a long-standing attraction to Japanese poetry. In 2024, his suite The Japanese Seasons was published (Gehrmans Musikförlag), where he set to music thousand-year-old poems taken from the anthology Hyakunin isshu . For North Sea More modern poetry has been chosen, written by Nakahara Chūya (1907 – 1937). Chūya lived a short life between the two world wars, marked by personal losses. The grief is reflected in his poetry.
Nakahara Chūya writes about a violent ocean whose waves are in eternal conflict with the dark sky – a meaningless conflict where they curse each other’s existence. “For me, the poem reflects powerlessness, a timeless feeling that not only characterized Chūya’s life, but many young people today who are thrown into a society filled with increasing uncertainty,” says Vikman.
(Text from berwaldhallen.se)
Saturday, September 6th at 9 pm in Berwaldhallen
Concert intro with Carl Unander-Scharin and Åsa Unander-Scharin (choreographer) at 8:20 PM
berwaldhallen.se/konsert/calligrammes-radiokoren-moter-krista-audere
The concert can be heard live (or for 30 days afterwards) on sr.se.