Hans Abrahamsen (born 1952)

Wednesday, September 3, 2025

Concert Hall, Helsinki Music Centre, Mannerheimintie 13 A, 00100 Helsinki, Finland

The FRSO opened its 25-26 Season with a symphonie avec un alto principal; in other words, Berlioz’s Harold in Italy, written for Paganini and his then recently acquired excellent viola (although he would reject Berlioz’s orchestra-favouring score if later having a change of heart), the music loosely based on Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (describing the “travels and reflections of a young man disillusioned with a life of pleasure and revelry and looking for distraction in foreign lands”); the rest is Berlioz’s imagination. This performance wasn’t helped by a spoken narrative before each movement, and even during one of them; well-meant of course, but Berlioz was a master musical painter and his descriptive powers were here short of excitement, languor, and a sense of place and circumstance, this despite first-class playing and a seasoned contribution from Lawrence Power.

Hans Abrahamsen’s woodwind-rich scoring of the for-piano Children’s Corner for a fair-sized orchestra (including brass, used sparingly) proved exquisite and refined, sympathetic to Debussy’s original, the FRSO and Collon equally responsive to the new dress, and then Pines of Rome was ebullient, cinematically descriptive, magical (especially the episode introducing a pre-recorded nightingale) and majestic, the final pages, with extra brass and steady tread, bringing to Technicolor life the initially ghostly images of Roman legionnaires, dynamic increases nicely incremental, the effect stirring and impressive.

Danish National SO/Fabio Luisi; September 2, 2021; world premiere of complete set. Danish Radio Concert Hall.