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Experience the 2023/2024 season in Berwaldhallen

Welcome to the 2023-2024 concert season in Sveriges Radio’s Berwaldhallen concert hall! Over the coming year the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra and the Swedish Radio Choir will offer a wide range of concert with focus on Nordic music, the jubilee of Sergei Rachmaninov, a plethora of newly written music and of course cross-genre collaborations. Our subscriptions where released on the 27th of April and our tickets on the 25th of May. Buy your tickets here.

During the six introductory concert weeks the focus of the programming will be on Nordic music, including both new works and classics on the repertoire. Other highlights will be jubilee concerts for Sergei Rachmaninov and Anders Hillborg and visits by global artists such as the violinists Hilary Hahn and Frank Peter Zimmermann, the cellists Sol Gabetta and Jakob Koranyi and the pianists Maria João Pires and Alexandre Kantorow. The renowned conductors Esa-Pekka Salonen, Herbert Blomstedt, Nathalie Stutzmann, Barbara Hannigan and Elim Chan will be guesting, and the chief conductors Daniel Harding and Kaspars Putniņš will of course be making repeated appearances.

You can find further details of the concert programmes for autumn 2023 and spring 2024 below. Do take the opportunity right now to book your favourite seat in the auditorium for the concert series of your choice. General ticket sales for the entire season started on the 25th of May. As usual, there will be radio broadcasts of all the concerts on Sveriges Radio’s channel P2, and videos of selected concerts will be available to watch on Berwaldhallen Play.

The Baltic Sea Festival returns with a new emphasis  

The Baltic Sea Festival starts its season on 24th August. As usual, world-class concerts will alternate with scientific discussions around sustainability. Esa-Pekka Salonen, Sinikka Langeland, VoNo and Facce d’Amore are just some of the names from the rich and varied programme. A new feature of this year’s Baltic Sea Festival is the Baltic Sea Festival Science Lab. This project has involved commissioning nine young composers with writing music that highlights the work of nine young researchers from the Baltic Sea region. With the help of a director, the researchers and composers will create works that musicians from the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra will perform live during the festival.

Focus on Nordic music

The concert season will commence with a special emphasis on Nordic music. For six weeks the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra and the Swedish Radio Choir will be shining a spotlight on both well-known Nordic masterpieces and newly composed Nordic works. The programmes will include compositions by Edvard Grieg, Elfrida Andrée, Jean Sibelius and Wilhelm Stenhammar, as well as pieces by Britta Byström, Hans Abrahamsen and Anna Thorvaldsdóttir, and will celebrate the 80th birthday of Daniel Börtz. Eva Ollikainen, Alan Gilbert, Tabita Berglund and Christian Reif will be guest-conducting the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra, and the soloists will include María Dueñas, Christian Ihle Hadland, Jakob Koranyi, Johanna Wallroth, Jeremy Carpenter, Malin Broman, Alva Holm and Alison Balsom.

Under the baton of Daniel Harding, the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra will also be visiting Linköping and the Lahti Sibelius Festival in September 2023, and they will be touring Europe in the  spring of 2024.

The Swedish Radio Choir  

Over the course of the season the Swedish Radio Choir will be displaying the breadth of its large repertoire, which ranges from Claudio Monteverdi to Sven-David Sandström. Two of the 2021 Eric Ericson Award finalists – Harry Bradford and Julia Selina Blank – will each be conducting a concert with the choir, presenting both standard and contemporary a cappella works. The choir’s conductor laureate Peter Dijkstra will also be conducting them in Giacomo Rossini’s Petite Messe Solennelle, and together with the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra and the Eric Ericson Chamber Choir they will be performing Ludwig van Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis under the baton of the orchestra’s conductor laureate Herbert Blomstedt. The Canadian conductor Barbara Hannigan will be guesting at Berwaldhallen in a concert version of Igor Stravinsky’s opera The Rake’s Progress, for which the Swedish Chamber Orchestra and international soloists will be appearing on stage with the Swedish Radio Choir.

The chief conductor Kaspars Putniņš will be conducting the choir in works by Sergei Rachmaninov, Johann Sebastian Bach’s great Mass in B Minor and Sven-David Sandström’s Sonnets of Darkness and Love, with the trombonist and singer Nils Landgren. Sonnets of Darkness and Love will also form part of the next stage of the Swedish Radio Choir’s major tour of Sweden – starting in May 2023 and ending in 2025, when the choir celebrates its 100th birthday.

New music

Sveriges Radio is one of the biggest commissioners of new music in Sweden, and during the course of the season there will be a number of premieres in Berwaldhallen. During the Baltic Sea Festival we will already be able to hear brand-new music by Mats Larsson-Gothe, Mirjam Tally, Johannes Pollak and Jesper Nordin. During the season we will be treated to Emmy Lindström’s Sång Utan Ord (Song Without Words) – a work for choir and orchestra inspired by Wilhelm Stenhammar’s Sången (The Song). Other new works to be performed are a trumpet concerto by the American trumpet player and composer Wynton Marsalis and a clarinet concerto by Jacob Mühlrad, with the soloist Magnus Holmander and under the baton of Martin Fröst. There will also be a world premiere of Ludvig Norman’s piano concerto – a work which was not completed during the composer’s lifetime, but which the pianist Peter Friis Johansson has now adopted and restored.

Jubilees

Two birthdays are being celebrated during the concert season: Sergei Rachmaninov’s 150th birthday in autumn 2023 and the Swedish composer Anders Hillborg’s 70th birthday in spring 2024.

The Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra, the Swedish Radio Choir and internationally renowned soloists will be performing well-known works by Rachmaninov: Piano Concerto No. 1 with the soloist Alexandre Kantorow, Symphony No. 3 under the baton of Daniele Rustioni and Isle of the Dead with Nathalie Stutzman at the podium. We will furthermore be hearing the rarely performed choral symphony The Bells and the a cappella choral work Vigilia. 

Anders Hillborg is one of Sweden’s best-known contemporary composers. In spring 2024 his musical output will be celebrated in two concerts. In the first concert Esa-Pekka Salonen will be conducting among others Hillborg’s Sirens for two soprano soloists, choir and orchestra, with Ida Falk Winland and Hannah Holgersson singing the solo parts. In the second concert the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra will be conducted by Roberto González-Monjas in Hillborg’s orchestral work Eleven Gates. 

Cross-genre collaborations

Over the coming season Sveriges Radio’s Berwaldhallen concert hall will not only be hosting classical music. In October Christoffer Nobin will lead the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra in a musical tribute to singer and song writer Marie Fredriksson (1958-2019) together with Amanda Bergman, Emil Svanängen (Loneydear) and Helena Josefsson.

During the last couple of years Miriam Bryant has become one of Sweden’s most popular singer and song writers. In december the star from Gothenburg will visit the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra and conductor Hans Ek in new symphonic interpretations of her poignant music.

In the spring of 2023 the cult declared Radiojazzgruppen reappeared at Berwaldhallen after many years in dormancy. Since then, the group together with artistic director Nils Landgren, has visited many other stages but will finally back in the Swedish Radio concert hall in February 2024.  More cross-genre collaborations will

There will also be plenty of entertainment for our youngest concertgoers. Radioapan (Radio Monkey) and Niklas Riesbeck will be going on holiday with musicians from the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra, and Johan Pejler will be inviting children to Sing-Alongs with young singers from Täby Musikklasser music school. Christian Reif will also be conducting the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra in Nathaniel Stookey’s musical whodunit The Composer is Dead, with Niklas Riesbeck as the detective.

At the darkest time of the year in Sweden we will be presenting the classic St Lucia concerts, involving Nacka Musikklasser and exciting guest artists. Shortly after that you can attend our atmospheric Christmas concerts, performed by the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra, the Swedish Radio Choir and top-drawer soloists. In January 2024 you can look forward to the traditional and festive Twelfth Night concerts where star conductor Dalia Stasevska leads our ensembles together with soprano Johanna Wallroth, baritone Ola Eliasson in a musical fire work with something for
all tastes.

The Baltic Sea Festival 2023 has the theme Heroes & Anti-Heroes, which is expressed in several of the musical stories and which, from a sustainability perspective, is also a source of inspiration for new role models for the future. Who is a hero today? Together with its partners, the Baltic Sea Festival 2023 presents different perspectives on the heroes – and anti-heroes – of our time.

Welcome to this year’s Baltic Sea Festival on 24 August – 2 September. Read the entire program here.