
MINNEAPOLIS — When Thomas Søndergård mounted the podium of the Minnesota Orchestra at Orchestra Hall on Jan. 10, he picked up a microphone, turned to the audience, and said, “Finally, I get to experience a true Minnesota winter.”
Indeed, it was cold out, and in ensuing weeks temperatures often dipped below zero, though it must be said that frigid weather has never deterred music lovers in the Twin Cities from attending concerts. In fact, this particular event, the first program in a two-week mini-festival titled “Nordic Soundscapes,” was almost sold out. The Danish-born Søndergård, in his second season as music director, seems to have earned rather quickly the respect and affection of audiences here, as he also has with the musicians. And the program itself was surely something of a draw as well.
By now, audiences here know a thing or two about Sibelius courtesy of Søndergård’s predecessor, Osmo Vänskä, whose taut, modernist readings of the Finnish master’s orchestral works, both on disc and in concert, made this old repertoire seem new. Wisely, except for the use of Finlandia as a thunderous finale to the first concert, Søndergård stayed away from Sibelius. One other familiar name, Edvard Grieg, was represented as a wrap-up to the final concert — the Suite No. 1 from Peer Gynt — and, as part of a chamber music program, the String Quartet No. 1 in G minor. Two of Carl Nielsen’s concertos — those for violin and clarinet — were also played, as was his wry chamber piece Serenata in Vano.

But the focus of the festival was clearly on new and recent work by living composers from the five Nordic countries: Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Finland, and Iceland, all of which can boast of vital musical cultures in countries where music education is free and the arts are considered an integral part of a meaningful life and thus worthy of generous government support.
As part of the first program, principal cello Anthony Ross gave eloquent voice to the solo part of “Air to Breath,” the final movement of Bow to String by Daníel Bjarnason, who was born in Reykjavík in 1979 and has for some time maintained dual careers as composer and conductor. When Bow to String was premiered in its first version, it was named Composition of the Year at the 2010 Icelandic Music Awards. The music is elegiac and mournful. In a program note, the composer says he intended to make music that was “frozen in time, like a painting that you would look at from different angles and in different light.” The performance Søndergård led was deeply felt.
Another Icelander, one who is becoming better known in this country, Anna Thorvaldsdottir, was represented by Spectra, a string trio structured in six short movements that are to be performed in a seamless flow from one movement to the next. It was premiered in Copenhagen in 2018. The composer says her works, which she considers to be tone poems, convey “my own distinct experiences of nature.” She makes drawings of her pieces, she says, “to help her map where a piece is going.” Violinist Emily Switzer, violist Marlea Simpson, and cellist Beth Rapier delivered the music’s melancholy tone impressively.

Two of the more intriguing works performed were re-workings of music of the past: Lyric Pieces for Orchestra by the Norwegian composer Ørjan Matre and Kongsgaard Variations by Anders Hillborg, who is now Sweden’s most-performed living composer. Lyric Pieces, which was commissioned and premiered by the Bergen Philharmonic in 2019, is a modern reimagining of six miniatures by Grieg originally written for solo piano. Matre takes Grieg’s pieces, adds an orchestra, and pushes it through a kaleidoscope of minimalist techniques.
For the first of the six, “Arietta” from Book 1, Op. 12, a solo piano onstage plays Grieg’s original piece, a gentle, delicate tune, and then the orchestra takes over, first the strings, then the woodwinds. The music soon starts to lose its shape, as if it were melting, and then fades away. Whirling woodwind figures along with shimmering bells and chimes characterize the exhilarating fourth piece, “Butterfly.”
Unlike the others, the final piece, “Remembrances,” is a trifle spooky. We hear the Arietta theme again, this time as if the piano were off in the distance, and the sound is scratchy, suggesting it’s either a dream or we’re listening to an old — really old — recording. It turns out that what we were hearing was Grieg himself playing on a recording he made in 1903. The orchestra soon takes over and plays for a while, adopting the same rubato phrasings that were common in Grieg’s day. The piano returns near the end and is joined by the orchestra as the music slowly subsides.
What is Matre suggesting in his clever set of Lyric Pieces for Orchestra? Is it that the composer eventually leaves us, but his spirit lives on, a ghost playing a piano that can barely be heard, his meanings forever lost, his thoughts drowned out by today’s aggressive, noisy performers? Something like that.

For Hillborg, the voice from the past wasn’t that of Grieg but Beethoven — the Arietta theme from the German composer’s last piano sonata. Hillborg’s description of the work contrasts the two, noting that whereas Beethoven’s piece is a set of rigorously carried out variations with steadily increasing intensity, his Kongsgaard Variations — a string quartet composed in 2006 and dedicated to John and Maggy Kongsgaard, founder of the Arietta winery in the Napa Valley — are more like meditations with no directional process, except that each instrument has its own “little song” (or arietta). At about mid-point in the piece, we hear Beethoven’s theme strangely distorted and stretched. It returns later and, at the end, quoting Hillborg, “the music completely vaporizes into a mist of harmonics.” Four string players from the orchestra — violinists Alan Snow and Sarah Grimes, violist Lydia Grimes, and cellist Sonia Mantell — brought easy flow and deep, rich tones to these pieces.
On the first night of the festival, another orchestra musician, Gabriel Campos Zamora, who has been principal clarinet since 2016, gave a winning and animated account of Nielsen’s Concerto for Clarinet, the composer’s final work for orchestra and probably the most serious and intense of the Nielsen concertos.
The young Swedish-Norwegian violinist Johan Dalene seemed an appropriate soloist in Nielsen’s Violin Concerto, played on the festival’s final night on Jan. 18, given that Dalene won the 2019 Carl Nielsen Competition. The Violin Concerto is more traditional and lacks the melodic invention of the other two concertos, the Flute Concerto being the third. Even so, Dalene’s mellifluous tone, sensitive phrasing, and lively rhythm made this a performance to remember.
The festival opened with the Concert Overture in D Major by the Swedish composer Elfrida Andrée. Born in 1841, Andrée was the first woman in Sweden to conduct a symphony orchestra and the nation’s first professional female organist. Her Concert Overture, though tuneful, is not a great piece, but it displays talent and skill and made a meaningful contribution to the festival.
As a bonus, the orchestra engaged folk musicians and choral ensembles specializing in music of the Nordic countries to perform in the lobby of Orchestra Hall before and after the concerts. One of these groups, the Nordstär Ensemble, featured a young woman playing an instrument we seldom see or hear, a Swedish bowed string instrument called a nyckelharpa, which from a distance looks like an armadillo, an animal that is not to be feared.

Beyond that, it should be asked: Did we discern after these superbly played concerts whether there is, in fact, a Nordic sound or style of music? Perhaps the offerings were too diverse for generalizations, though it has been noted that much of the music of Northern Europe moves slowly and, especially in more recent times, has a meditative character.
Hillborg thinks there is a Scandinavian voice. “If you take the music of Sibelius,” he said in an interview, “in which some people think there’s nothing happening, in fact we Scandinavians think there are lots of things happening.”
It is perhaps relevant that two of the composers represented in this festival, Hillborg and Bjarnason, have written quite a bit of pop music along with the “serious” music they are better known for, at least in certain circles, and that they discovered the various types of music in tandem as they were growing up. This seems especially true in Iceland, where Björk is said to be the most admired musician. And this may explain in part why even the most avant-garde music in the Nordic countries is accessible to large audiences. (It would be as if the modernist Elliott Carter, as a young man, anonymously wrote “Tutti Frutti” rather than Little Richard.)
As an indication of the success of “Nordic Soundscapes,” Søndergård told the audience on the final night, “We are already making plans for another festival like this next year.”