Avant’s Summer Play celebrates its 30th anniversary on 24-28 June 2015. This year, the five-day music event will be artistically designed by German conductor-composer Matthias Pintscher. The festival programme, subtitled “Idyll” , includes 14 concerts or events. The Avant-garde will also perform in restaurants in Porvoo and new club nights will entertain after the concerts.
Dialogue between new creation and tradition in the programme
Matthias Pintscher (b. 1971) has been one of the most interesting names in contemporary German music since the beginning of his career. In XXX Suvisoito, Pintscher appears as composer, designer and conductor. The aim was to create an ensemble that looks like Avant, but celebrates the orchestra by bringing something new to the table again.
“With the selection of works I bring to Porvoo, I want to highlight the healthy dialogue between new creation and tradition. Mozart’s Gran Partita will be performed alongside works whose scores have not yet dried out,” says Pintscher about the artistic design of the programme. “What is the role of ‘new’ music today? After all, the score of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 7 was also earth-shatteringly ‘new’ in its day!”
Matthias Pintscher was a guest composer at Avant’s Summer Play in 2006. An integral part of Pintscher’s compositional profile is musicianship and conducting: “My thinking as a conductor is fed by what I compose and vice versa”.
Pop-up concerts and club nights complement the Suvisoito programme
“The idyll is analysed as a phenomenon and the question is posed as to our role as active artists in a world where we are surrounded by terror, war and injustice”, Matthias Pintscher explains the theme of Suvisoito.
At the opening concert on 25 June, Pintscher will conduct Avant in the Arts Centre in works that in different ways align with the orchestra’s Suvisoitto tradition. Pintscher will be joined by Magnus Lindberg and Hannu Lintu as conductors of Suvisoito.
Six works by Matthias Pintscher will be performed during the Suvisoito. The beauty and pain of life will be the theme of the closing concert on 28 June, featuring Idyll, composed by Pintscher. It will end with Mahler’s Maan laul (Song of the Earth), with mezzo-soprano Lilli Paasikivias soloist.
Other soloists include Pekka Kuusisto, violin, Emanuele Torquati, piano, Tuomas Katajala, tenor, Tomas Gricius, trumpet, Ville Hiilivirta, French horn, and Valtteri Malmivirta, who will play the solo part in the premiere of the trombone concerto composed by Jouni Kaipainen, representing the latest music of Suvisoito.
There will also be a composition workshop for young composers, a children’s concert, pop-up concerts in Porvoo’s restaurants and new club nights hosted by Tero Toivonen, accompanied by Marzi Nyman and her friends. Festival buses will take concert-goers from Helsinki to the concerts and back.
The concert venues are Avanti! hall and Tehdassali in Porvoo Art Factory, Pernaja Church, Culture House Grand and Porvoo Little Church.
Check out the full programme!
