The Unseen and the Seen – Music from the USA Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra, Susanna Mälkki, Fleur Barron & Ville Rusanen

• Time:

  • Sat 16.8.2025 19:00

  • Duration: approx. 2 h, interval

• Address:

  Helsinki Music Centre, Concert Hall
  Töölönlahdenkatu
  00100 Helsinki

• Tickets:

  20–72 / 15–64,80 € (Musiikkitalo)

  Get tickets

Event Introduction

The Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra and conductor Susanna Mälkki present a United States-themed concert at Helsinki Festival, featuring rarely performed works and two premieres.

The concert includes the Finnish-language premiere of John Adams’s work The Wound-Dresser (1988) for chamber orchestra and baritone. Based on a poem by Walt Whitman, the piece portrays the poet’s experiences as a volunteer tending to the wounded during the American Civil War. Whitman cared for injured soldiers, including his own brother, recording the horrors of war in a poem. Adams’s elegiac interpretation of the text now receives its Finnish-language version, Lääkintämies. The soloist is Ville Rusanen, a baritone enjoying a prominent international opera career.

The concert opens with Unstuck (2008), by American contemporary composer Andrew Norman, inspired also by a literary source. Struggling with a creative block, Norman found renewed inspiration in Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Slaughterhouse-Five, particularly in the phrase “Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time.” The Radio Symphony Orchestra will perform the piece for the first time in Finland.

The English composer Thomas Adès offers his vision of America in America: A Prophecy (1999), a work commissioned by the New York Philharmonic for orchestra and mezzo-soprano to celebrate the turn of the millennium. Adès’s piece presents an almost apocalyptic vision of America at the dawn of the new millennium. Performing at the Music Centre as a soloist is Singaporean-British opera singer Fleur Barron, one of today’s most versatile and in-demand mezzo-sopranos.

The concert concludes with Symphony No. 2 (1897–1902) by Charles Ives. Ives is one of the foremost composers of American modernism, and his rarely performed symphony was also premiered by the New York Philharmonic in 1951, despite being completed at the turn of the century. The symphony, drawing on American folk traditions, was warmly received by both audiences and conductor Leonard Bernstein, and Ives, who had remained outside official music circles, experienced a resurgence of recognition in the early 1950s during his final years.

Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra
Susanna Mälkki, conductor
Fleur Barron, mezzo-soprano
Ville Rusanen, baritone

Program:

Andrew Norman: Unstuck (Finnish premiere)
Thomas Adès: America: A Prophecy
John Adams: The Wound-Dresser (Finnish-language premiere)

Charles Ives: Symphony No. 2

Categories

Classical and Contemporary Music

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