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The contour of the sixteenth Båstad Chamber Music Festival, 23-28 June, is breaking the horizon.
Composer in Residence - Tommie Haglund
Over the years the Festival's Composers-in-Residence have come from near and far - from Iceland, from Russia, from Ireland etc. Never as near as this year. Tommie Haglund, residing in Halmstad, a city visible across the bay from Båstad, is considered one of Sweden's foremost composers of his generation. Born in Kalmar in 1959 he started composing already at the age of eleven. Haglund had his real breakthrough in 1988 with the piece for cello and piano "Intensio Animi", commissioned for the 300th anniversary of Emanuel Swedenborg, the Theosophist. It was followed by a long row of commissions from Vienna, London, USA and other places. He wrote an opus for the fiftieth birthday of H.M. Carl XVI Gustav of Sweden, and there have been commissions from Radio Sweden. The cello concerto, "Flaminis Aura", was first performed by his good friend John Ehde with the Helsingborg Symphony Orchestra in 2001, and four years later the same orchestra gave the first performance of Haglund's violin concerto, "Hymns to the Night", with Elizabeth Pitcairn, playing on Felix Mendelsohn‘s violin! The string quartet "Land of Souls" was commissioned by the world famous Medici Quartet for their 30 year anniversary and got its first performance in England, also in 2001. In the autumn of 2003 Tommie Haglund won the Swedish Musical Publishers' annual award for "The most significant contemporary music work" for his composition "The Daughter of the Voice", a work that had been commissioned for, and had its first performance at, the St. Birgitta Jubilee in Vadstena earlier that year.
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