The program
The artists
The concert
The evening opens with two Swedish folk arrangements by K.J. Ankarblom — intimate, rooted, and deeply Scandinavian in spirit — before moving into The Nordic Seasons by violinist and composer Hanna Helgegren, a work commissioned by and written for Camerata Nordica. Inspired by the folk melody Länge leve livet, the piece unfolds across four movements mirroring the cycle of the year: Autumn, Winter, Spring, and Summer. It is performed alongside a film by British-Swedish filmmaker Jack Walton, whose sweeping landscape imagery — from the frozen stillness of Lapland to the golden light of a Swedish summer — deepens the music’s connection to the natural world.
After the interval, the programme turns to two early masterworks. Shostakovich’s Two Pieces for String Octet, op. 11, was composed when he was barely eighteen, caught between the completion of his First Symphony and the restless ideas already pulling him toward new works. The result is piquantly dissonant, rhythmically fierce, and unmistakably the voice of a young modernist at full throttle.
The evening closes with Mendelssohn’s Octet in E-flat major, op. 20, written at sixteen and widely regarded as one of the most extraordinary achievements in the history of chamber music. Sprawling, brilliant, and almost impossibly assured, it remains a work that has never quite been surpassed.
