On Estonian Radio. I missed the Pärt (including Adam's Lament) because I was out late this morning in order to collect my prostate medication at the pharmacy. The concert was recorded in February in Stockholm, and she is accompanied by two percussionists, Ulugbek Temirov and Uktamjon Rasulov, playing the 'frame drum', the doyra.
It has been rather more smokey this morning that yesterday morning (or so it seems to me) but the wounded Sun is there in the sky now; am looking forward to another evening with a reasonable temperature. It is 2030 in Estonia.
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At some point in the next few minutes, the livestream of the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra performance of Beethoven, MacMillan, Mahler, and Lehár will begin. I think. Manfred Honeck is the conductor. In any event, I've switched to their recording of Maestro Honeck conducting Tchaikovsky's Symphony no 6 in 2016 while waiting.
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An interview with Maestro Honeck is underway; it is the first night of the season at Gothenburg, I gather. The MacMillan Larghetto on the program is Sir James's orchestration of his Miserere, if I understood Honeck correctly, made for the Austrian conductor's 60th birthday. There is no audience in the hall.
The trumpet and the French horn in the Larghetto are stationed out in the empty theatre. Very lovely indeed.
Mahler's Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen now, sung by Peter Mattei, Wozzeck in the Metropolitan's production of Berg's opera back in December and January before the plague nonsense overcame too many people's good sense.
Have got the GSO's National Day concert running; it begins with the Swedish national anthem. The glaring whiteness forced me to notice how the six singers of the Härlanda boy's choir well represent that great Swedish virtue of diversity; there is one child who might be, oh who knows, of Thai or Burmese or Indian parentage. I'm only half-listening and even less assiduously watching but thus far that kid is the only POC who's made an appearance. It is all faintly amusing here but I'm sure the perfect blend of patriotic self-satisfaction and high and folk culture there, featuring the sandals and socks shod actor Tomas von Brömmsen, as Ciceron, master of the ceremonies.
I liked that as the GSO Vocal Ensemble began a well-known Swedish song ('In This Delightful Summertime' by B.G. Hallqvist) in an apartment house courtyard (the musicians distributed their germs to many small venues) the husband handed off the baby to the wife and went out to the balcony to watch the performance. Enlightened Swedish parenting! (Having made that observation, I am re-watching the segment since by the end of it lots of people are out on their balconies: perhaps the wife and baby are, too. Indeed they are, and not 'at the end', either. I am re-interpreting the husband's handing off of the infant as him doing his husbandly duty: 'let me go investigate before you two come outside'. Which is just as much fantasy as my first impression, since the scene begins with the husband, wife, and baby watching the preceding segment-- Mozart's Clarinet Concerto's second movement-- on their laptop.)
The concert ended with the overture to Mozart's Die Zauberflöte; the conductor has been Santtu-Matias Rouvali, who's a Finn.
According to the end credits, the six boys from the Härlanda Gösskor are surnamed Rosander, Hellberg, Byström, Carlheim, Mogren, and then the sixth is named Leo: I'm going to guess Leo's the KOC and his surname isn't given because... who knows why. Perhaps the well-known Swedish embrace of migrants means that Leo's legal status is ambivalent? perhaps he's a refugee whose family was persecuted in the old country?
Perhaps because the crime serials I've watched set in Sweden have been 'gritty' and 'atmospheric' I don't remember having noticed how lovely the landscape is.
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