If all participants stay healthy, it now looks like it will be the premiere of Karin Rehnqvist‘s work Silent Earth.
The first premiere would have taken place in Amsterdam in early spring 2020. The pandemi blocked this.
Now the NTR ZaterdagMatinee (the Dutch equivalent of BBC Proms) is making a new attempt and has January 29, 2022 as its first public performance of Rehnqvist’s work. The concert takes place in Concertgebouw. A half-hour long work composed for mixed choir and orchestra, with poems by Kerstin Perski.
Silent Earth is composed for Groot Omroepkoor (Dutch Radio Choir, with Peter Dijkstra as choir leader) and Radio Filharmonisch Orkest (Dutch Radio Philharmonic Orchestra). It will be conducted by Dima Slobodeniouk, the Russian-born conductor who now resides in Finland.
What will happen?
– We sat one evening in March 2019, Kerstin and I, and talked about us humans and the Earth, says Karin in her work commentary.
– Our planet Earth, increasingly exposed. Vulnerable. Ice is melting, forests are burning, streams are flooding in a way we do not recognize. The proportions are scary. What will happen? What’s happening right now?
– I try to listen to what needs to be said, needs to be expressed. Not what I want, but what is needed.
It becomes a conversation with the notes, where I start processes, sensitive to where the music then wants, Karin explains.
It eventually became the work Silent Earth. With the movements
- Silent Earth, 2. We, Who Once Were, 3. The Burning Earth.
Silent Earth is commissioned by Eduard van Beinum Stichting and NTR ZaterdagMatinee and The Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra.
