Dear Public!
Foto: © Helen Pé
The eighteenth annual Båstad Chamber Music Festival will once again bring you high class concerts featuring Swedish and foreign artists of renown. Our main venue, the Apelryd Barn, the Festival's heart, will serve up both musical and culinary experiences, the latter often with a distinctly local flavour.
The Four Elements - air, fire, earth, water - provide this year's Festival theme. Directly or indirectly, the elements have inspired many composers. The Festival will open with Vivaldi's The Four Seasons - Spring being inspired by air, Summer by fire, Autumn by earth, and Winter by water. The elements also symbolize the different stages of life. As always we find it natural to present music for the young, but also music by the young. Air is the element of our children's concerts, fire springs from the appearances of the Øresund soloists, the Master Classes, the Fredrika Bremer scholarship winner, and in the Festive Concert with the laureates of the Birgit Nilsson Foundation Scholarship Fund. This year's two laureates have already covered some way on the road to international fame.
The well known satirist, cultural journalist and preacher Olof Buckard will underline the themes of several concerts by reciting his own and other writers' texts. Why, music has that fantastic quality of enabling us to reach our own interpretations!
This year we present one of the world's most celebrated composers today, Kaija Saariaho. Her music is played on all important concert and opera stages all over the world. Now she will be our guest as Composer Profile of the Year. We will perform several of her chamber music works, and she will participate in an open panel discussion to tell us about her creative work. Furthermore, during the Festival we shall have the honour to give the first performance of her just concluded string trio, Cloud Trio!
Our exciting concerts will often incite you to deep afterthoughts. Here I want particularly to hold out the one entitled "The Power of Music". It is dedicated to artists who, for religious or political reasons, were - or are - unable to practice their art. This category will be represented here by composers whose music was banned during the Nazi era. We will be reminded of the wide range of the power of music!
In addition to this the week will be illuminated by many well known chamber music works. Our Swedish star cellist Frans Helmerson will meet the successful Vertavo Quartet in Schubert's wonderful String Quintet. We should be in for a memorable rendering by violinist Raphaël Oleg and pianist Bengt Forsberg of Brahms' Regensonate, as well as the performance of Mozart's Piano Quartet with the Zebra Trio and pianist Florent Boffard. The inspirational festival spirit brings new tantalizing constellations. Particular challenge emanates from the greater and less often played works, such as Spohr's Septett and Glazunov's String Quintet.
I wish to welcome you warmly to this fantastic festival week in mid summer - a time to enjoy music, strawberries and Champagne!
Karin Dornbusch
Clarinettist and Artistic Leader
