John Storgards

Lapland Chamber Orchestra & John Storgårds – Mahler: Symphony No. 10 (Arr. M. Castelletti for Chamber Orchestra) (2019)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:17:04 minutes | 1,22 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © BIS

Left unfinished at the death of the composer, Gustav Mahler’s Tenth Symphony has exerted an enormous fascination on musicologists as well as musicians. Whether fully orchestrated in specific passages, or a sole melody in others, there is one continuous line throughout the surviving manuscript pages and over the years a number of different completions or performing versions have seen the light of day. One of the latest is this ‘recreation’ of the work for chamber orchestra by composer and conductor Michelle Castelletti. In her liner notes to the recording, Castelletti describes the symphony as ‘possibly one of Mahler’s most passionate emotional outbursts and autobiographical creations’. The decision to make an orchestration for chamber forces was inspired by the example of the Viennese Society for Private Musical Performance, established by Arnold Schönberg in 1918 with the goal of performing newly composed music. Among the works performed by the Society were chamber orchestra versions of Mahler’s Symphony No. 4 and Das Lied von der Erde – the latter made by Schoenberg himself – and in her version of Symphony No. 10, Castelletti uses a similar instrumentation. This new completion appears on album for the first time, in a performance by the acclaimed Lapland Chamber Orchestra under John Storgårds, the ensemble’s artistic director since 1996.

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John Storgårds, Lapland Chamber Orchestra – Karlsson: 7 Songs & Clarinet Concerto (2018)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 54:44 minutes | 913 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © BIS

Lars Karlsson was born in 1953 on Åland, an archipelago in the Baltic Sea which forms part of Finland although its population is Swedish-speaking. He soon moved to Helsinki, however, in order to study at the Sibelius Academy, where his teachers included Einar Englund and Einojuhani Rautavaara. Since 1976, he has himself been teaching at the Academy. Following his own distinctive route on the Finnish contemporary music scene, Karlsson composes in a neotonal vein and has been called a ‘romantic modernist’ – as well as a ‘modern romanticist’. His work list includes all genres from chamber music and solo works to orchestral works, and he has also composed extensively for voices. Two of his later works are recorded here, in performances conducted by John Storgårds with whom Karlsson has collaborated extensively, both as conductor and violinist. Storgårds and his Lapland Chamber Orchestra have previously recorded four discs with music by Kalevi Aho for BIS – discs which have received critical acclaim and international distinctions such as the prestigious German ECHO Klassik award. Here they are joined by Gabriel Suovanen and Christoffer Sundqvist, the soloists for whom Lars Karlsson composed his Songs to texts by Lagerkvist and Clarinet Concerto. The song cycle charts what the composer calls ‘a life-journey’, setting texts by the Swedish poet and Nobel Prize laureate Pär Lagerkvist. In the Concerto, Karlsson instead revisits his own production, exploring an interest for fourths and fifths which was particularly strong during the early part of his career, but also reusing themes from other works, for instance in the folksong-like second movement.

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Lapland Chamber Orchestra, John Storgårds – Abrahamsen: Schnee (2022)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/192 kHz | Time – 54:15 minutes | 1,58 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Digital Booklet, Front Cover | © Dacapo

Hans Abrahamsen’s feelings for snow are reflected in the titles of his works, for example in Winternacht, in the opera The Snow Queen and more straightforwardly in Schnee. In his music, the snow has many different states, and the colours are graduated with finely felt accuracy: snow white, cool blue white, blinding white, crystal clear.
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Lapland Chamber Orchestra, John Storgårds – Vagn Holmboe: Chamber Symphonies (2012)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/192 kHz | Time – 01:09:03 minutes | 2,43 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Digital Booklet, Front Cover | © Dacapo

Vagn Holmboe’s three chamber symphonies span the period when the Danish com poser immersed himself in symphonic works; they are a fine demonstration of his preoccupation with the processes of nature and the idea of musical metamorphosis. Lapland Chamber Orchestra and its conductor John Storgårds focus on Vagn Holmboe’s clear musical expression in three major works that have never previously been recorded.
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