Dear Reader,
My concert on sunday with Lund City Orchestra was hailed as a great success. It was sold out already two weeks before the concert and the packed hall were waiting with great expectation. The Russian consul general and composer David Mnatsakanyan had driven down to Lund all the way from Gothenburg together with vice consul Evgeny Sysoev. That was a great honour which raised expectations even more.
The soloist was Alexandra Hjortswang who is a London-based young Swedish violinist. She played the Tchaikovsky violin concerto excellently and I am sure she has a bright future ahead of her.
In the second half, it was time for the orchestra and I to perform Tchaikovsky's fifth symphony. It is a symphony which lies very close to my heart and I have performed it many times and also recorded it on CD.
Lund City Orchestra is such a special orchestra as they have something that many orchestras do not have. They give so much of themselves and we gelled extremely well already from the first rehearsal. The fact that all the musicians played their hearts out and indulged in the music without any reservation, led to a concert which was cheered to the rafters. An elderly gentleman came up to me after the concert with tears in his eyes and told me that the City Orchestra had not played that well for the 25 years it had existed. All credits to the principal conductor Roger Andersson for having developed such an excellent and devoted orchestra. Another thing that makes me respect him even more is the fact that he invites guest conductors like me to perform with his orchestra when he could well just conduct all the concerts himself. He is also quick to invite young artists to perform and his choice in Alexandra Hjortswang was ingenious. I wish the other Swedish orchestral directors had the same vision and courage as Roger Andersson.
The well renowned critic Lennart Bromander wrote in the Skanska Dagbladet the following review:
Kristofer Wahlander made, at his first visit in Lund a couple of years ago, a very good impression. He has, for a Swedish conductor, a slightly unusual education with studies at the St. Petersburg Conservatoire – a city in which he has been very active. It therefore looked like a good idea, for his return, to let him completely devote himself to Tchaikovsky’s music. It turned out to be just that.At the same time as the fifth symphony’s emotional realizations seemed to flow freely, he kept them under strict surveillance with sure art of balance. Tchaikovsky’s symphonies are so masterly not the least for the fact that the emotional surge is bridled by an excellent feeling of form. Kristofer Wahlander had a real flair for this and the charge of the music therefore became so much more concentrated. Wahlander is also an excellent conductor in the strictly technical field. He got the different orchestral voices to express themselves and phrase in a unified manner and the strings played not only with passion but also in an unusually supple way.
I hope this was another chapter in a long and exciting collaboration with Lund City Orchestra - an orchestra that I am always keen to return to.
