Concert with the RSPO Orchestra Academy

Since 2016, an orchestra academy has been affiliated with the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra. The international RSPO Orchestra Academy is a one-year advanced academic programme for young musicians. The programme is run in collaboration with the Department of Music and Art at Linnaeus University in Växjö. Under the guidance of the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra’s section leaders, the musicians receive individual coaching, chamber music training and orchestral experience.

They also showcase their talents through a series of public chamber music concerts – such as this one featuring this year’s academy musicians performing two highly virtuosic works. Svante Henryson’s Off Pist for clarinet and cello is a personal and rhythmically charged piece where classical tradition meets jazz and folk music.

György Ligeti (1923–2006) was one of the most influential composers of the 20th century. His Six Bagatelles for wind quintet is a concentrated and colourful collection of pieces based on movements from his earlier Musica ricercata for piano. Here we hear Ligeti’s sensitivity to rhythm and contrast, as well as his trademark irony and absurd humour. The work was composed during Ligeti’s time in Hungary, and at its premiere in 1956 the final movement was banned from performance – it was deemed too dissonant and modernist by the state’s cultural censors.