The first-ever concert in the exhibition space of the Amos Rex Museum will explore the relationship between paintings and music by artist Birger Carlstedt. The Avant Chamber Orchestra will feature soprano Mari Palo as soloist. The Birger Carlstedt retrospective exhibition opens on 11 October.
The “From notes to canvas” concert is a collaboration between the museum and the Avant Chamber Orchestra. Opening at Amos Rex in October, the exhibition presents Birger Carlstedt (1907-1975), one of the most important pioneers of modern Finnish visual art, for whom Paris in the 1920s and the music of the time were central. Experimenting with Expressionist, Cubist and Surrealist elements, the artist’s musical influences are evident in his works and can be seen in the titles of paintings such as Debussy’s Sunken Cathedral and Ravel’s Noctuelles. Carlstedt was also familiar with the jazz that took over Paris in the early decades of the last century.
Carlstedt married the Danish-born pianist France Ellegaard, known for her interpretations of Chopin, in 1949, a marriage that helped strengthen the link between music and Carlstedt’s art. He brought the Parisian atmosphere to Finland, for example, when he designed the interior of Le Chat Doré, a restaurant owned by his mother on Unionkatu in Helsinki in 1929.
In the Avant Chamber Orchestra concert, fashionable and avant-garde Paris will be played not only by Ravel, Debussy and Stravinsky, but also by Jean Barraqué’s electronic Étude and Sidney Bechet’s jazz. A post-jazz American flavour will be added by Buck Ram and The Three Suns inTwilight time. There is also a place for Aarre Merikanto, whose modernism was treated as badly as Carlstedt’s by the domestic media. Avant’s soloist is the multi-talented soprano Mari Palo.
Mari Palo is a versatile singer who takes a down-to-earth approach to everything she does. She started her vocal studies at the Central Ostrobothnia Conservatory and graduated with a Master of Music from the Sibelius Academy.
Mari Palo is a regular guest at productions of Finnish regional operas and free companies and at the Savonlinna Opera Festival. As a Lied singer and orchestral soloist, she has performed all over the world. He has been a regular guest at the Finnish National Opera since 1999.
In addition to her full concert calendar, Mari Palo also passes on her knowledge to future colleagues. She works as a singing teacher at Kokkola University of Applied Sciences
Avanti! Rex: From notes to canvas
16.11.2019 at 14.00
Avanti! & soprano Mari Palo
Amos Rex museum Studio Rex
Concert ends at 15.15, no intermission
Tickets: 25€/15€
PROGRAMME:
Frédéric Chopin: Valssi in C sharp minor op. 64 (1847)
Igor Stravinsky: Three pieces for string quartet (1914)
Jean Barraqué: Étude (1954)
Roger Sinclair – Henri Bataille: La Boîte à musique, chanson française (1940)
Igor Stravinsky: Serenata from the ballet Pulcinella (1920)
Maurice Ravel: Noctuelles from the piano suite Miroirs (1905)
Aarre Merikanto: Piano Trio (1917), parts II Andante and III Vivace
Buck Ram, Artie Dunn, Al & Morty Nevins: Twilight time (1944)
Sidney Bechet: Petite fleur (1952)
Claude Debussy: La cathédrale engloutie, 1. Prelude (1910)
