Nordic Boomers at Tanglewood

Festival of Contemporary Music

July 27, 2026

Published in Sequenza 21

By Christian Carey

LENOX – The annual Festival of Contemporary Music concludes with an orchestra concert by the Tanglewood Music Center Orchestra. This year, the festival was curated by Esa-Pekka Salonen, and featured themed programs spotlighting emerging composers, Gen X creators, and Monday’s concert, “Nordic Boomers,” dedicated to fifty and sixty-something Scandinavian composers. Most were colleagues of Salonen from his early days as a student composer. These connections were fruitful, but each composer forged their own path, as was evidenced by the FCM concert. 

Magnus Lindberg’s Serenades (2020) was curiously named, as it had a muscular demeanor that seemed at odds with its title. Salonen conducted, bringing out details of its vivid orchestration and soaring lines. The piece contained a small quote from Beethoven’s Opus 111. The same source reference point would play a large role in a piece later on in the program.

Hans Abrahamsen’s let me tell you (2013), in a libretto crafted by Paul Griffiths, is a setting of the words spoken by the character Ophelia in Shakespeare’s Hamlet. One of Abrahamsen’s best known works, it contains a challenging, wide-ranging and expressively intricate part for solo soprano. Alexandra Henderson sang its demanding and declamatory lines with thoughtful interpretative skill, and displayed plummy low notes and a well-supported upper register. Lauren Smith conducted with nuanced attention to dynamics and phrasing. 

Anders Hillborg’s Kongsgaard Variations (2006) used the aforementioned quotation, from the arietta movement from Beethoven’s Opus 111 piano sonata, as the basis for a series of variations that he considered meditations rather than the often found developing trajectory of the form. A string orchestra piece, its expert writing was deployed in a variety of playing demeanors. A particularly attractive section featured solo violin, viola, and cello trading folk style melodies in a manner reminiscent of the music played on a Hardinger fiddle, Norway’s national instrument. Elsewhere were neoclassical, minimal, pastoral and modernist variations of the Beethoven theme, some allowing it center stage if slightly morphed, with it instead being submerged in others. Julian Gilewski conducted an effusive, shimmering version of Hillborg’s abundantly attractive piece. 

The concert concluded with Salonen’s Cello Concerto (2016), conducted by the composer. Written for Yo-Yo Ma, the piece has an extraordinarily challenging solo part. Senja Rummakainen played it with impressive virtuosity and admirable commitment. Cello concertos are notorious for balance issues, but Salonen’s comprehensive knowledge of the orchestra made space both for multihued and powerful orchestral passages and vivid solo writing. The second movement included electronics, with looping of seagull glissandos, an extended technique, interweaving into knots of sound. The third movement features something of a second soloist, with percussionist Patrick Sorah playing bongos, sharing center stage with Rummakainen, his syncopated performance ricocheting in mercurial duets with the cellist.  

The Festival Orchestra was well-prepared and performed the formidable program with musicality and consummate professionalism. Salonen’s curation of the whole FCM was inspired, and one hopes that he remains a part of Tanglewood’s activities for many years to come.

• Christian Carey