Helsinki Chamber Orchestra: Farewells & New Beginnings

Youth means many things in music: passion, inexperience, naivete… Youth can be touching, and powerful (or at least so says an orchestra of young people!). This concert, held at the orchestra’s traditional home of Temppeliaukio Church, this program unites three young composers, with barely fifteen years difference in age but dramatically different outlooks on the world. Young Mendelssohn, barely 14, writing a String Symphony as a composition exercise with surprising maturity. Linde, 21, writing as fast as his pen would move, unaware of his early death but producing music as if he knew his time would be short. And Schubert, 29, meditating on the fear and comfort of death after receiving the diagnosis that would one day kill him. A lot of life happens when you’re young, and the beauty, pain, joy, and depth of this music helps us relish it.

This  program also emphasizes youth as a moment of change, at times joyous,  sorrowful, or both, with a reflection on the farewells and new  beginnings that have marked all of us in our young years. Indeed, this  concert is also the opportunity for the Helsinki Chamber Orchestra to  bid farewell to two of its young founding members, who after  contributing to make the orchestra what it is today, will move on to the  next steps of their musical journeys.

The program consists of Mendelssohn's String Symphony No. 10, Bo Linde Piano's first Piano Concerto and Schubert’s famous masterpiece Death and the Maiden arranged by Mahler. The concert will be conducted by Aku Sorensen, the orchestra’s former concertmaster, and will be held on April 27 2023.