Ibert, Kuula, and Brahms

With these three composers, the Umeå Music Society kicks off the 2026–2027 concert season at the Norrlands Opera. The soloist will be Ebba Wallén, principal flutist of the Norrlandsoperan Symphony Orchestra, who will perform Jacques Ibert’s Flute Concerto .

Ebba Wallén was born in Malmö in 1994. Her formal education includes two master’s degrees. One in music from the Norwegian Academy of Music and the University of Music and Performing Arts Munich, completed in 2021, and one in Baroque music and the Baroque recorder (travero), to be completed in 2023, from the University of Catholic Church Music and Music Pedagogy in Regensburg. Ebba has performed with the Swedish Chamber Orchestra, the Oslo Philharmonic, the Malmö Symphony Orchestra, the Helsingborg Symphony Orchestra, and the Philharmonie Salzburg; she has also won numerous prizes in international competitions and received scholarships from the Royal Swedish Academy of Music in Stockholm and Villa Musica in Germany.

Tonight’s concert opens with Suite for Orchestra No. 1, Op. 9:1, *Landscape* (*Maisema*), composed between 1906 and 1909 by Toivo Kuula (1883–1918). With his romantic sensibility, he may be the Finnish composer most deeply rooted in his native region of South-East Ostrobothnia. He studied intermittently at the Helsinki Music Institute and, in 1908—when this work was written—had Armas Järnefelt as his teacher. On Walpurgis Night in 1918, while the Whites were celebrating their victory at the Battle of Vyborg—an event Kuula attended—he was shot in the head by two riflemen. Kuula died on May 18, and the riflemen involved died before the trial took place.

Jacques Ibert ( 1890–1962) was, along with Arthur Honegger and Darius Milhaud, one of France’s most representative musicians of the 20th century. Ibert is often described as a composer who defied conventional compositional rules. His Concerto for Flute and Orchestra was written in 1932 and premiered in 1934.

After the intermission, the concert concludes with Johannes Brahms’ Symphony No. 2 in D major, Op. 73, composed in the summer of 1877. In November of that same year, Brahms wrote to his publisher that he had never written anything so sad and melancholic. But dear audience—just sit back, listen, and enjoy!