The theme of Avanti! Summer Sounds festival is Dreamlands and Dystopias – the main concert programme is now released

The 37th Avanti! Summer Sounds festival will again take over Porvoo as it runs at the Art Factory and its surroundings from June 28 to July 2, 2023. The main programme is now released and will be reinforced during the spring with forums and club events.

The 2023 festival is entitled Dreamlands and Dystopias. The programme is curated by composer Unsuk Chin and Maris Gothóni, the Belgian National Orchestra’s head of artistic planning and a curator of multiple festivals. The two describe the programme:

“We feature music by many fearless artists who challenge limits and question borders, music that can be equally thought-provoking, playful, and stimulating. Our wish was to present a glimpse of the great variety of the music of our time, with composers originating from no less than nineteen countries, including some of the most acclaimed figures of our time’s music and new rising composers. The music chosen reflects the visionary potential of music in times of uncertainty, featuring equally dreamworlds and dystopian fears. The concerts’ titles speak for themselves: ‘Dark Mirror’, ‘Musical Toys’, ‘Mimodramas and Horror Clowns’, ‘False Memories’, ‘Twisted Pearls and Four Headed-Nightingales’, and ‘Strange Rituals’.”

We will hear both new music from contemporary composers and classic pieces. Ensemble sizes will range from solos to orchestras over 40 musicians strong. Avanti! will have sopranos Faustine de Monès and Tuuli Lindeberg, flautist Bjørnar Habbestad and pianist Mei Yi Foo as soloists. Bas Wiegers and Emilia Hoving will conduct the concerts.

The week will include almost 20 Finnish premieres and the world premiere of Antti Auvinen’s flute concerto, commissioned by Avanti! We will hear daily Finnish premiers of works from the following composers: Unsuk Chin, Claude Vivier, Alberto Ginastera, Silvestre Revueltas, Sunghyun Lee, Hans Abrahamsen, Ondřej Adámek, Gérard Pesson, Marko Nikodijevic, Andrew Norman, Mikel Urquiza, Luke Bedford, Vito Žuraj and Wolfgang von Schweinitz. Other composers include Joseph Haydn, Heinrich Ignaz Biber, John Zorn, Jukka Tiensuu, Michael Daugherty, Helmut Lachenmann, George Benjamin, Peter Eötvös, Sofia Gubaidulina, György Kurtág, Chris Paul Harman and Frederick Rzewski, among others.

A children’s concert has been a prominent part of Summer Sounds for years. This year Avanti! is producing a new version of the beloved folktale “The Emperor’s New Clothes” with the Red Nose Company, the first professional Finnish theatre group specialising in clownery. The music for the performance is composed and arranged by Marzi Nyman. The performance is bilingual in Finnish and Swedish.

The traditional Avanti! Club is again being held in the rustic Art Factory, Factory Hall. The event, titled Dark Mirror, includes music, an ecstatic club atmosphere in the summer night of Porvoo, and the Art Factory’s restaurant’s offerings to enjoy with friends.

Once again, this year’s festival includes a composition masterclass. The masterclass, taught by composers Jukka Tiensuu and Tomi Räsänen, ends in a concert where Avanti!’s musicians perform pieces composed by the participants. The participants get to work on their compositions with the musicians while getting important feedback in the process. The main venue of the festival is the Art Factory, Avanti Hall. Concerts are also held in the Pernaja Church and the Art Factory, Factory Hall.

The tickets to the Summer Sounds festival will go on sale on Monday, March 27, 2023, at lippu.fi

Contemporary American music crackles at this year’s Summer Sounds – Programme curated by composer Julia Wolfe brings record number of international guests to Porvoo

Now entering its 37th season already, Avanti’s Summer Sounds will this year run in Porvoo from June 29 to July 3. The Artistic Director of the festival themed “Body Language” is Julia Wolfe, one of today’s greatest American composers.

Wolfe has emerged in the 2000s with works combining American folklore, genres ranging from rock to minimalism, crackling energy and unique line-ups. Summer Sounds will be presenting a cross-section of her compositions, culminating in riSe and fLY at the final concert. Drumming his body and percussions in this masterpiece will be legendary Colin Currie. Resident in New York, Wolfe is one of the founder composers of the Bang on a Can artists’ collective dedicated to contemporary music, together with David Lang and Michael Gordon. The programme, with its strong American slant, will also afford glimpses of other composers colleagues of Wolfe, including two of her previous students Shelley Washington and Anna Clyne.

Backing these composers of the “postminimalist” era will be works by György Ligeti, Steve Reich, Meredith Monk , John Adams and John Luther Adams. And even older echoes of the past will be Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings and Aaron Copland’s Appalachian Spring, both of which, back in the day, paved the way for America’s open-faced music shunning neither emotions nor “alien” genres. For even more distant exemplars, Wolfe has invited along Fanny Mendelssohn, Bach and Beethoven, the very personification of dynamic, foreword-looking music.

Guest conducting the Avanti Chamber Orchestra will be Brad Lubman, a leading performer of contemporary American music. In addition to Colin Currie, the soloists will include Bang on a Can All Stars guitarist and multi-instrumentalist Mark Stewart and the Norwegian Trio Mediæval. The riveting József Hárs, a trusted Avanti partner, will also be appearing in the role of conductor.

Porvoo awash with music – sound art on the west bank

Summer Sounds will jump the festival gun in Pernaja Church on Wednesday evening, and Avanti folk will also be taking over Old Porvoo during the festival. The fanfare will this year ring out in Town Hall Square at 12 noon on Friday July 1, and from there continue to Porvoo Cathedral for a free chamber concert. Saturday will feature promising young composers, when the works they have created at the Composition Workshop will at last be premiered at the free concert beginning at 13:00 in the Voluntary Fire Brigade Hall.

One of the items on the Summer Sounds programme is a sound art work on the west bank of the river, as part of the Porvoo art project combining new urban development and art. One of the first results of this project, a sound art work born of collaboration between Avanti and the Cultural Services of the City of Porvoo, will be launched. Issuing from the loudspeakers attached to the intelligent street lamps will be short works composed for them by Maya Hynninen, Jennah Vainio and team Minna Leinonen-Jussi Suonikko.

Avanti! congratulates the 10-year-old Art Factory

Avanti is proud to congratulate the Porvoo Art Factory, once again the home base of the Summer Sounds festival and now celebrating its 10th anniversary. Each year from 1986 to the first decade of the 21st century, the old factory building was given a good dusting to get it ready for Summer Sounds, until the decision was at last made to convert it into a cultural centre. The Art Factory hall opened in 2012 was named the Avanti Hall, which is an indisputable recognition of the ever-closer relationship between Summer Sounds and the City of Porvoo.

New visual image

Lille Santanen has given Avanti’s Summer Sounds a new visual image all of its own. This incorporates a special Avanti typography in a distinctive style described by her as organically playful.

– When I was designing the visual Summer Sounds image, I thought each of the motifs would find a natural place in the grid. But when I got down to work, I found they did just as they pleased and settled wherever they fancied. I reckon this is precisely what happens to performers and guests alike at Summer Sounds.

Tickets for the Avanti XXXVII Summer Sounds: “Body Language” festival are on sale at Lippupiste outlets and www.lippu.fi. For details of the concert programmes see https://avantimusic.fi/en/program

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Avanti performs on April fools day 1st April at the new Dance House’s renovated Pannu Hall. The concert is not a total scam, but not quite ordinary. Even though the aim is to sell a pig in a poke, bits of programme can be revealed. Mioko Yokoyama’s Piano Concerto hasn’t yet been performed in Helsinki and the dystopic Piano Sonata “Helvetinkone (Hell Machine)” by Sampo Kasurinen needs its second coming.

The concert is conducted by young and promising Kristian Sallinen. The poke is still left with a pig – a new piece by Magnus Lindberg, Mystery Musician and variety of surprises and oddities. Take a risk and surrender to Avanti!

Ticket sales

Tickets are sold via new Tix, website based sales operation, that is easy to use and buy pdf-tickets without service fees. Tickets are also sold at the box offices in the Glass Courtyard and Konttori at the Cable Factory.

Prices: 30 / 25 / 15 €
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Conductor Kristian Sallinen makes his debut with Avanti!

Kristian Sallinen (born 2001) is currently studying orchestral conducting under the guidance of Professor Sakari Oramo at the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki. As part of his conducting masterclasses he has had the opportunity to conduct the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra, Tapiola Sinfonietta, Helsinki, Vaasa,Joensuu and Kuopio Philharmonic Orchestras (Finland), the Lithuanian State Symphony Orchestra and the Berlin Sinfonietta.
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You can enjoy music on site at the Musiikkitalo or watch a live stream for free at Helsinkikanava.fi. The online concert will be available from Tue 14th September 2021 at 7 pm for a month, until Tue 12th October 2021.

The concert will be broadcasted on Yle Radio 1 on Thu 16th September 2021 at 19:02. You can also listen to it at Yle Areena until Tue 12th October.

You can download the program here.

AUF: Music for everyone – Three orchestras together again

Tuesday 14 September at 7 pm, Music House

Avanti! Chamber Orchestra
UMO Helsinki Jazz Orchestra
Finnish Baroque Orchestra

Taavi Oramo, conductor

Programme:
Arvo Pärt (1935-): Fratres
Michael Torke (1961-): Adjustable Wrench
Henry Purcell (1659-1695): The Fairy Queen Suite & The Fairy Queen Suite, arr. Ursula Reicher
Helena Winkelman (1974-): Papa Haydn’s Parrot
Sampo Kasurinen (1990-): Do Androids Dream (premiere)

We’re happy to announce that audiences at home can also participate in this year’s Summer Sounds festival. We’re streaming couple of our concerts online at YouTube.

Online live concerts are:

• Thursday July 1st at 7 pm, concert Frankenstein!!
  • HK Gruber, conductor & chansonnier
  • Eriikka Maalismaa, violin
  • Programme:
    Bernd Richard Deutsch: Dr Futurity
    Jouni Hirvelä: Rakka (premier)
    intermission
    HK Gruber: Frankenstein!!

• Sunday July 4th at 6 pm, Final Concert
  • John Storgårds, conductor
  • HK Gruber, baritone
  • Pipoka Trio:
    Petri Keskitalo, tuba
    Veli Kujala, accordion
    Jarmo Julkunen, guitar
  • Programme:
    Joseph Haydn: Symphony No. 27
    Markus Fagerudd: Stream & River Motion
    intermission
    HK Gruber: Manhattan Broadcasts
    Kurt Schwertsik: Starckdeutsche Lieder und Tänze op. 44

Welcome to join us!

A Concert Overture discovered among the manuscripts of works by Finland’s national composer Jean Sibelius has been premiered after a wait of 120 years. A piece referred to in the press as the overture to his opera The Maiden in the Tower was first heard at the Turku Fire Brigade Hall on 7 April 1900, with the composer himself conducting, and it was soon forgotten.

Conductor and Sibelius expert Tuomas Hannikainen found the 12-minute work among the collection of Sibelius manuscripts. It is, he says, “based on the music for Sibelius’s stage work The Maiden in the Tower and was, as it were, hiding among the original parts for this. The characteristic ingenuousness and optimism do therefore not come as a surprise.”

Now, more than 120 years later, the Concert Overture has been woken from its enchanted slumber, edited by Hannikainen and published. A remarkable composition, it has been slotted into the Masked Musicians concert reflecting the Covid era. Avanti! is also performing Sibelius’s melodrama The Countess’s Portrait and movements from the incidental music to Belshazzar’s Feast.

The well-known short story The Masque of the Red Death by Edgar Allan Poe has inspired artists from the visual arts to music. One example is the tone poem Conte Fantastique by the French composer André Caplet now to be heard in an arrangement for narrator, harp (played by Laura Hynninen) and string orchestra.

Conductor Tuomas Hannikainen has masterminded a production combining music, theatre and heraldic art, the texts to be narrated by actor Timo Torikka.

“The ongoing social isolation has set me wondering what purpose the arts might serve in the new world order,” says Conductor Hannikainen. “How can we use classical music, living so strongly in tradition, to mirror the present times and to draw creative strength from contemporary phenomena? Masked Musicians is one attempt to answer such questions.”

Click here for the recording of the sound broadcast on Yle Radio 1.

A video recording of the concert will be posted on the orchestra’s YouTube channel at 19:00 on 30 May. To watch the recording of Sibelius’s Concert Overture click here or watch below.

Avanti! is this year greatly multiplying its musical offering in Porvoo with a series of summer concerts in addition to its familiar Summer Sounds festival. This unique concert series will be enveloping the whole town and spreading out into its nearby villages for chamber recitals performed by small ensembles. Summer Sounds tickets will go on sale at 12 noon on Friday May 21, when it will also be possible to book seats for the free concerts.

Players to plan summer concert programmes

Avanti! is this year putting on a unique series of free concerts spread across the town, at manor houses and concert halls and in town squares. Avanti!’s Artistic Director Kari Kriikku promises programmes that are fun, serious, absurd and surprising, each in its planners’ own image. “The keen Avanti! guys have been the driving force behind these concerts. We’re so thrilled to have found such impressive venues for the concerts with the help of our friends in Porvoo.”

The series begins in the first week of June at Bosgård Manor, where promising young Bengi Canatan will be conjuring magical timbres from the harp. The next concert, at the Villa Albert, will be testing the limits of the accordion in the hands of Veli Kujala with the Avanti! Quartet. Finland’s local council elections will also be noted with music on polling day (June 13) as the Duo Matalata welcome voters on tuba and bass clarinet near a couple of polling stations. Also scheduled for June are some French Baroque, and music from the Middle Ages to the present day on various instrumental line-ups.

After the festival, in July, early Baroque hits will be paired with premieres of works by young Finnish composers in Näsimäki Chapel. The programme for July and August will further feature a selection of concerts each creating a world of its own. The summer concert series will culminate at the end of August with a Disklavier spectacle full of surprises.

Sassy music at the Art Factory

The 36th Avanti! Summer Sounds festival will present a varied concert menu in Porvoo from June 30 to July 4. The organisers are keeping an eagle eye on the latest official Covid regulations to ensure the safety of players and audience alike. “Only a very limited number of tickets will initially go on sale, but we’re hoping to increase the number the closer we get to the festival,” says Avanti!’s Executive Director Annika Mustonen. “But in any case we promise to stream some of the concerts.”

The Artistic Director of this year’s festival is Austrian composer, singer and conductor Heinz Karl “Nali” Gruber, with a theme – “Freche Musik – Sassy Music” – admirably in keeping with his style: music that is brazen or impudent. The music of Gruber, who made his international breakthrough with Frankenstein!!!, is simultaneously both popular and challenging, entertaining but serious.

In the leading role at the festival is postmodern music by Gruber and his Viennese contemporaries seasoned with some new Finnish works and a broad selection of chamber music. The programme will include the premiere of a violin concerto, Rakka, by Jouni Hirvelä with Eriikka Maalismaa as the soloist, and a work commissioned from pianist-composer Mioko Yokoyama. Saturday evening at the Avanti! Club on Saturday will be devoted to a swinging show of Avanti!’s hallmark genre – experimental chamber music – by Anna Meredith, Jukka Tiensuu and the Pipoka Trio.

Conducting the festival concerts will be Artistic Director Gruber, John Storgårds and Håkan Hardenberger, all able to switch with ease to the role of soloist, even in mid-concert. The traditional Baroque concert will view the Thirty Years’ War through works of that time in the magnificent Pernaja Church and with soprano Tuuli Lindeberg as the soloist. The festival’s opening fanfare will ring out in Porvoo’s Town Hall Square at 12 noon on July 1.

Ticket sale starts on Friday 21st of May at Lippupiste’s website: www.lippu.fi
Concert program is published here: https://avantimusic.fi/en/program/