November music - OS #1: Rebecca Saunders / Øyvind Torvund / Simon Løffler

Oslo Sinfonietta presents a special program in the Grote Kerk with brand new works by Rebecca Saunders, Øyvind Torvund and Simon Løffler!

Rebecca Saunders: Skull (2023)

Saunders’ Skull is the final part of a triptych further consisting of her two previous ensemble works Skin (2015/16) and Scar (2018/19) The piece is a joint commission by Oslo Sinfonietta, Ensemble Modern, Ensemble Contrechamps, Festival Acht Brücken | Music for Cologne and La Biennale di Venezia and was premiered earlier this year in Germany, Switzerland and Denmark.

The Danish first performance of the pieces prompted the music magazine Seismograph to write the following:

"Wildly impressive was also Rebecca Saunders' constantly smoldering Skull, whose dark abyss was drawn up by pulsating Korg synth bass, and otherwise brought to life by the Oslo Sinfonietta's incomprehensibly precise rendering of an accurately restrained apocalypse. In a flash, an animalistic chaos of overblown brass, timpani and strings in a death struggle was perceived, but the work's uncanny strength was precisely that the savagery was never completely let loose but was kept on a leash like a foaming monster."

As an epigraph to the score, Saunders quotes from Haruki Murakami's Hard-boiled Wonderland and the End of the World: “The skull is enveloped in a profound silence that seems nothingness itself. The silence does not reside on the surface but is held like smoke within. It is unfathomable, eternal, a disembodied vision cast upon a point in the void.”

Øyvind Torvund: Into the Blue (2023)

Oslo Sinfonietta and Øyvind Torvund have worked closely together for almost 20 years, ever since Torvund was the ensemble's resident composer from 2003 to 2004. Today he is an award-winning and internationally recognized representative of Norwegian art music. His new work "Into the Blue" draws inspiration from TV-, as well as big band music: endlessly meandering between humor, irony, and a happy ending.

Simon Løffler: F.O.W.L. (2023)

In F.O.W.L. Simon Løffler combines conventional and unconventional instruments, an act that puts the musician and the musician's physical appearance in relief, the composer explains: "It is quite often the case with conventional instruments that you basically control them with your fingertips. I have always been interested in bringing more of the body into play, so when I combine conventional and unconventional instruments, it is, among other things, to give the music a more physical expression.” The composer is fully aware that he achieves the physically expressive character at the expense of the fine nuances of the instruments. "You could say that I am interested in reducing the large expressive ambitus of classical instruments, in order to bring something else into them instead," he says.

You'll find more info and tickets at November Music's web page