Visionary Soundscapes

New music for organ and saxophones
Premiere of three works commissioned by Stockholm Saxophone Quartet

Stockholm Saxophone Quartet
Jörgen Petterson
Linn Persson Kornhammar
Mathias Karlsen Björnstad
Theo Hillborg
Mila Ortgies Thoors, organ

The new compositions in this concert were commissioned by the festival Swedish Spring Music (Svensk Musikvår) and sponsored by the National Swedish Council of the Arts (Statens Kulturråd) and the Helge Ax:son Johnson Foundation respectively.

Zacharias Ehnval (b. 1991)
Window of tolerance

Slowly, almost unnoticed, rolling fronts of reformation. Quickly shimmering revolution. An endlessly gurgling continuum, take after take. Cut. Like driftwood on the sea: purposefully heading for shore. The true intentions are completely alien to the planet it rules. Window of Tolerance is a resonant exploration of the waveforms of the psyche and its duration over time.

Paula af Malmborg Ward (b. 1962)
Timestuck

"To rewind time", "time catches up", "out of step with time", "to be one with one's time"... concepts I have pondered and pondered over. We living people consciously relate to time; we feel time. And we populate time whether we want to or not. I am fascinated by this. Time has always been an important parameter in my composing. But now I think time is out of order. I can't explain it any better. If I close my eyes tightly, can I get stuck for a moment in a time without unwanted knowledge that suddenly overwhelms me?If I close my eyes really tightly? The work with Timestuck began as a piano improvisation. Step by step, a dialogue between organ and saxophone quartet grew; an expression meeting around an impossible–or perhaps possible–mission.

David Riebe (b. 1988)
Vertigo

A new work for saxophone quartet and organ that takes its starting point in a feeling of vertigo, of limbo and borderland, the feeling of not knowing where you are or what is what. The piece builds on musical ideas from the saxophone quartet "Kostymen sys i det tysta” (The costume is sewn in silence, Tomas Tranströmer, 1983) from 2022, in which the two playing techniques embouchure-glissando and multiphonics create soundscapes where the sounds go in and out of each other so that in the end you don't know who is playing what. Now the organ is also added to the soundscape, with its multifaceted sound palette and its ability to fill the entire church interior with its tones. In this way, a feeling is created that the music comes from everywhere and nowhere, something that is also reinforced by the fact that the saxophonists begin to move around the church room during the second half of the piece. “Vertigo” is also a journey between different energy levels and emotional states, where the violent and chaotic transitions into the eerie and mysterious or the pensive and calm.