The sound of the hardanger fiddle, with its distinctive tuning and resonating overtones, connects Norway to its deepest musical traditions while channeling centuries of joy and sorrow, patience and fortitude. A brand-new piece by our Composer-in-Residence Ørjan Matre combines the evocative sounds of the hardanger fiddle with the refined world of the classical violin. To play it, we welcome a musician who excels on both instruments and even managed to win Norway the Eurovision Song Contest on her hardanger fiddle in 2009 – Ragnhild Hemsing.

After the new concerto and two hypnotic excerpts from Matre’s own reworking of Edvard Grieg’s Lyric Pieces, Nicholas Collon conducts a symphony by Shostakovich that has been likened to ‘a film score without a film.’ In his arresting Symphony No 11, Shostakovich depicted the failed uprising of 1905, a pre-cursor to the Russian Revolution of 12 years later. As the great cellist Mstislav Rostropovich observed, this intensely-felt piece bears witness not just to the events of 1905, but to the tragically persistent patterns of suppression and violence in human history.