Silent Woods

Nicolas Altstaedt leader  

Wilhelm Killmayer: Sostenuto for cello and strings  

Antonín Dvořák: “Silent Woods” for cello and orchestra  

Wilhelm Killmayer: Jugendzeit   

Intermission  

Antonín Dvořák: Symphony No. 7 in D-minor, Op. 70   

In spring 2026, Nicolas Altstaedt introduced the Espoo audience to the Munich-based composer Wilhelm Killmayer (1927–2017), who makes a return in this concert with the short Sostenuto for cello and strings and the symphonic poem Jugendzeit. Composed when Killmayer was fifty, “Youth” appears as a nostalgic series of images, marked by breathtaking beauty and a sense of tentative hesitation. The cello was also a solo instrument dear to Dvořák, which in Silent Woods sings of the peace of the Bohemian forest. Dvořák said that his Seventh Symphony was meant to “stir the world.” To his German publisher, who was lukewarm toward the dramatic symphony, he added: “Let us hope that nations which possess art and cultivate it will never perish, however small they may be.”

Intermission  

Igor Stravinsky: The Firebird Suite

Music is, without a doubt, a universal language, and through it, the people of the world can express themselves and understand one another. Takemitsu found a connection between the strictly defined Japanese culture and French impressionism. In many of his songs, Ravel was interested in non-Western musical cultures. His two Hebrew melodies do not seek authenticity, but rather the magic of an ancient culture. In the same way, Kaija Saariaho’s Leino Songs explore the Finnish artistic pursuit of beauty and harmony dating back over a century. In The Firebird, Stravinsky immersed himself in the world of Russian fairy tales and found there the seed of modernism.