A dear return visit from acclaimed violinist

Violinist Ellinor D’Melon lives in Spain but comes from Jamaica and has Cuban ancestry. According to herself, she was very lazy as a child, which resulted in her learning to play the violin before she could walk. Despite her young age, she has already worked with conductors such as Zubin Metha and Jamie Martin, and performed in concert halls such as the Berlin Philharmonic and the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam.

Most recently, D’Melon visited Norrlandsoperan in August 2023, when she performed Benjamin Britten’s Violin Concerto and was rewarded with resounding applause. Already in 2021, she was a great success at Norrlandsoperan in Eduard Lalo’s Symphonie Espagnole and made such a big impression on the orchestra that VK wrote a major chronicle about her concert in addition to a rave review. Hold your breath, soon we will finally hear her play for us again, this time Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s Concerto for violin and orchestra.

Tchaikovsky’s Second Symphony

The concert continues with Pyotr Tchaikovsky’s (1840–1893) second and lesser-known symphony. It is called “The Ukrainian” because the composer started from three folk songs he heard in Kaminka, a village east of Kharkiv, where he was staying with his sister. Tchaikovsky himself has said that the family’s elderly servant Peter Gerasimovich sang the folk song Tranan to him while he was working on the work.

But we start with the short piece Solus by Andrea Tarrodi (born 1981), a dramatic commentary on the isolation and loneliness of the corona pandemic. When she created the work for the British concert Last night of the proms, in 2020, it was the first time the BBC hired a Swedish female composer for this honorary assignment.

The evening’s conductor is Eugene Tzigane, born in Japan in 1981 and chief conductor of the Kuopio Symphony Orchestra in Finland. Eugene has studied in Stockholm and also at the prestigious The Juilliard School, the same school where Phillip Glass once began his professional career.