Estimated duration

45 min.

Organizer

Helsingin kaupunginorkesteri

Nachtmusik (Night Music) – a piece of music that evokes the quiet, dreamy, or eerie atmosphere of the night.

Liam Mansfield, violin
Leena Jaakkola, violin
Jussi Tuhkanen, viola
Pekka Smolander, cello

PuskaBaletti:
Ronna Antikainen, dance
Vasiliki Kontopoulou, dance
Oona Pennanen, choreography

Angélica Negrón: Frecuencia Insular (World Premiere)
Béla Bartók: String Quartet No. 4
Allegro
Prestissimo, con sordino
Non troppo lento
Allegretto pizzicato
Allegro molto

Curated by Helsinki Philharmonic violinist Liam Mansfield, Nachtmusik is an ambitious multidisciplinary collaboration between the fields of music, electronics, and dance. The evening opens with the world premiere of Frecuencia Insular, a work for string quartet and electronics by Puerto Rican composer Angélica Negrón. Commissioned for this evening, the piece is inspired by the nocturnal animals native to her home island’s rainforests. The entire program will be physically interpreted by Finnish contemporary dance collective PuskaBaletti, which continues through the second half into one of the modernist masterpieces of the chamber music canon, Bartók’s String Quartet No. 4.

20th century novelist Milan Kundera, in commenting on Bartók’s expansion of art music with natural sounds, said about his Night Music, “sounds of nature inspire Bartók to melodic motives of a rare strangeness”. In Bartók’s Fourth String Quartet, that strangeness takes on an especially expressionist, nocturnal, and almost seductive character.

Written in five movements, the quartet is built around a mysterious central slow movement, surrounded by music of startling intensity, insect-like sounds, glissandi, pizzicati, and sharply etched rhythmic gestures. The result is a piece that seems to move between the organic and the otherworldly; at times evoking a forest alive with unseen creatures and at others something even more abstract and unsettling. In the context of Nachtmusik, Bartók’s quartet becomes a natural continuation of the evening’s exploration of the night: not as silence, but as a world of strange sounds, movement, and heightened perception.

Free admission – welcome! The programme begins at 8:30pm after the evening’s concert, and the café is open until 9:15pm.