Lutosławski's Concerto for Orchestra

Fast-becoming the world’s most in-demand Norwegian conductor, Tabita Berglund leads the Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra in a concert of gripping twentieth-century music that opens with a Norwegian masterpiece. Ludvig Irgens-Jensen wrote his Passacaglia in 1928, and it has stood as a monumental landmark ever since - a work of unswerving nobility that weaves a grand and inspiring edifice in sound around a looping bass line, all while managing to reconcile modernism, nationalism and classicism.

Nicolas Altstaedt is the soloist in Grazyna Bacewicz’s colourful, percussion-strewn Cello Concerto No. 2 but the concert ends with another landmark of central European music that echoes the work heard first. 24 years after Irgens-Jensen’s Passacaglia, Polish composer Witold Lutosławski used a series of folk melodies from his homeland as the basis for a vivid narrative for a playful, brutal and exuberant work that spectacularly exploits the individual and collective capabilities of a virtuosic orchestra and includes a looping ‘passacaglia’ bass line of its own.

Tabita Berglund, photo: Sarah Smarch