Just as ocean waves surge toward the horizon in a perpetuum mobile, the music in this programme unfolds almost without beginning or end. With eyes fixed on the infinite, Saariaho, Britten, and Sibelius create works deeply entwined with personal experience, the raw power of nature, and the sea.

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With the imposing Pacific Ocean as her co-pilot, Kaija Saariaho drove from Los Angeles to San Diego in January 2019. “I felt music literally streaming into my mind,” she recalled; ideas bubbled up for a new piece she simply called Vista.

Benjamin Britten portrays Peter Grimes as a raw outsider desperate to escape the suffocating grip of his village. His anxiety and inevitable downfall are mirrored in the turbulent North Sea—not a static backdrop, but a powerful, restless character in its own right.

A ‘symphonic fantasy’ rooted in his beloved Finnish nature: Sibelius defiantly cast his Seventh Symphony as a single, monumental arc. The music flows, falters, and swells—an unbroken stream reflecting the endless Finnish horizon that defined his world.

Beyond the Score

Beyond The Score is creation, encounter, and cross-pollination with the wider arts field. More voices. More impulses. And above all: music. More than music. [read more]

For this Beyond The Score, the sea flows between the notes. Shifting like the tide, orchestral masterpieces merge with the sonic seascapes of Vera Cavallin and Christophe Albertijn to form a single, seamless wave.

Through her Terrasonica project, Vera Cavallin is building a haunting archive of endangered sounds that captures the fading echoes of our natural world—from animal species to environments at risk of disappearing. “For this concert, I will create a soundscape in which field recordings and an acoustic instrument reconnect with one another, creating a sonic universe linked to the sea—what it evokes and its frequencies—while also carrying a message about the need to protect the element from which everything originated.”