Stockholm Variety

Ticket price range 85–520 SEK (discounts for students, seniors, youth).
Buy your ticket here:
https://www.konserthuset.se/en/programme/calendar/concert/2026/composer-festival-with-betsy-jolas-side-roads/20261106-1900/
(I will be in the körläktare, top left side on the booking chart.)

Come early to meet with fellow culture enthusiasts! From 6.15pm you will find me in Stora foajén, straight ahead from the main entrance, where food and drinks are served.

About the concert:
The French-American composer Betsy Jolas grew up in a circle where names such as James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, Henri Matisse and Ernest Hemingway were family friends. She herself studied with Darius Milhaud and Olivier Messiaen, whom she later succeeded as professor of composition at the Paris Conservatoire. In her music, Betsy Jolas combines modernist sharpness with a sensitive, deeply human voice. Her imaginative music carries traces of Impressionism, but can also be incisive or fragmentary, and radiate an almost improvisatory freedom.

The first part of the concert centres on three works for cello and string orchestra that are closely connected. We begin with Lutosławski’s Grave: Metamorphoses, where the atmosphere is initially sombre and weighty, with long lines in the solo cello. Gradually, the energy intensifies and the cello and orchestra develop a compelling interplay before the gravity returns. Toru Takemitsu was a master of atmosphere, and in Scene the cello is set against the shimmering backdrop of the string orchestra.

The cellist Anssi Karttunen suggested to Betsy Jolas that she write a work for cello and strings that could form a triptych together with Grave and Scene. The result was Side Roads. Here, the cello finds its own path through the constantly shifting sonorities of the string orchestra. “It is a deeply personal work that reflects Betsy Jolas’s unique way of moving freely through music history. With complete naturalness, she combines new ideas with references to earlier music, from the Renaissance to our own time,” says Anssi Karttunen, whom we also hear as the soloist.

In Well Met Suite for string orchestra, Jolas has reworked her own stage work Well Met into an independent concert suite. She has described the piece as a wordless depiction of an orchestral rehearsal: instruments tuning, musicians trying out fragments of music, discussing and returning to the rehearsal, before everything culminates in a lively and humorous musical sequence.

Shostakovich’s Chamber Symphony is an arrangement for string orchestra of his Eighth String Quartet, which is also by far his most frequently performed. Here, the music shifts between deeply sorrowful passages and dramatic outbursts in one of the 20th century’s most personal and compelling works for strings.

The music

• Witold Lutoslawski Grave: Metamorphoses for cello and strings 7 min
• Toru Takemitsu Scene for cello and string orchestra 5 min
• Betsy Jolas Side Roads for cello and string orchestra 18 min
• Intermission 25 min
• Betsy Jolas Well Met Suite for string orchestra 12 min
• Dmitry Shostakovich Chamber Symphony in c minor arr Rudolf Barshai 24 min

Participants

• Norrköping Symphony Orchestra
• Emilia Hoving conductor
• Anssi Karttunen cello

Buy your ticket here (scroll down to the calendar):
https://stadshuset.entryevent.se/ticketshop/tickets/guidad-visning

Come early to meet with fellow culture enthusiasts! I will be in the courtyard by the stairs from 11.45 am. The tour begins at 12 and runs for 45 minutes.

After the tour you're welcome to join us for lunch at Ragnars Skafferi which is located in the city hall building.

About City Hall:
Architect Ragnar Östberg was commissioned to design Stockholm's City Hall. It took 15 years to complete the structure, which was inaugurated on Midsummer’s Eve, June 23, 1923, marking the 400th anniversary of Gustav Vasa’s entry into Stockholm.

Ragnar Östberg was inspired by the volume and waterfront arcades of the Doge’s Palace, as well as the campanile of St. Mark’s Basilica, both in Venice. The City Hall’s exterior and interior also bear influences from the Italian Renaissance, Nordic Gothic, and Islamic art, which Östberg blended into a style all his own. Just over one million hand-molded and nearly seven million machine-molded bricks were used to complete the building. With its 106-meter-high tower, it's become a significant landmark.

Buy your ticket here:
https://www.berwaldhallen.se/en/concert/roots-of-love

Come early to meet with fellow culture enthusiasts! I will be below the stairs at the nearby Kungliga biblioteket (Humlegårdsgatan 26) at 5.30 pm for anyone who wants to walk over to Finlandsinstitutet together.

If there is interest, we'll go to a nearby cafe after the concert.

About the concert:
Welcome to a concert that moves through the borderlands of emotional anatomy, nature mysticism, and musical ecstasy. The Baroque garden of emotions was lush and untamed, with music given the fruitful task of tracing the soul’s innermost transformations and laying bare the flora of the heart. Earthly passion and heavenly devotion meet in arias where love blooms in triumphant splendour, only to be caught, a moment later, in sorrow and loss. A thread of contemporary love poetry from the Nordic region runs through the concert, joined by present-day Finnish verse to give voice to the same timeless longing that inspired the composers of the Baroque.

## Participants

• Erica Leys, soprano
• Karolina Åsberg, mezzo soprano
• Ingrid Rådholm Konvicka, alto
• Mariangiola Martello, cembalo
• Magnus Lanning, cello

## Works

• Georg Friedrich Händel: ”Caro! Bella!” from Giulio Cesare in Egitto5 min
• Georg Friedrich Händel: ”Son nata a lagrimar” from Giulio Cesare in Egitto 7 min
• Georg Friedrich Händel: ”With darkness deep as is my woe” from Theodora 4 min
• Joseph Marie Clément Dall'Abaco: Capriccio no 1 for solo cello4 min
• Barbara Strozzi: ”L’eraclito amoroso” 7 min
• Georg Friedrich Händel: ”Cara sposa” from Rinaldo 8 min
• Georg Friedrich Händel: ”To thee thy glorious son of worth” from Theodora 5 min
• Caterina Assandra: Duo seraphim 6 min

Ticket price range 198–395 SEK (discounts for youth).
Buy your ticket here:
https://dansenshus.se/en/program/andersson-dance-swe-ore/

Come early to meet with fellow culture enthusiasts! From 6 pm you will find me in Café Markelius in the foyer.

About the performance:
In ORE Örjan Andersson takes the landscape and nature as his starting point to reflect on humanity’s relationship with its surroundings and the changes they undergo. Drawing inspiration from Romantic artists – Caspar David Friedrich, J.M.W. Turner and Eugène Delacroix – the focus is on both the grandeur of nature and humanity’s impact on it.

Through the recordings of sound artist, field recordist and composer BJ Nilsen, the work travels between vastly different environments: from the evocative mountain landscapes of Alpe Djouan to the dark mine shafts of the Kirkenes massif, where dust, rock and industry characterise both the landscape and the living conditions. Here, mining is in full swing in a completely colourless world. The dust hangs heavy in the air, and only various monochromatic shades of grey and black are visible above the miners’ footprints.

In set and lighting designer Chrisander Bruns’s interpretation, these environments are transformed into artificial landscapes and spaces where new stories can take shape.

Örjan Andersson is one of Sweden’s most successful choreographers, with over 30 works to his name; he has created commissioned works for several of the leading companies in Sweden and Europe, as well as for his own company, Andersson Dance. In recent years, he has also worked in theatre, enjoying great success with his direction of *Werther* at Unga Dramaten, *Hamlet* at Folkteatern in Gothenburg, *The Queen’s Jewellery* at Helsingborg City Theatre, and *Orpheus & Eurydice* at Unga på Operan.