Dalia Stasevska

August 29, 2024 at PDT

Dalia's Mixtape

“The orchestra is one of the greatest instruments ever created,” Dalia Stasevska tells Apple Music Classical, “but what does its future sound like, and how will it develop?” The Finnish conductor strives to answer these questions in this absorbing and diverse album of contemporary and 20th-century pieces, each one highly original in both conception and realization.

“What I wanted to achieve in Dalia’s Mixtape is not having to talk about genres,” adds Stasevska. “This is just about great music: great composers who have something interesting to say, and who are pushing the symphony orchestra as an instrument in new directions. We have an incredible history in classical music, but it’s also really important to discover new things, to listen to our surroundings and respond to them.

As well as what we listen to, Stasevska is curious about how we listen to it. In an age of streaming, for instance, do we still listen to albums? “I was inspired by a discussion that I had with somebody who claimed he didn’t listen to classical music, but in fact he was without knowing it because he was listening to playlists.”

All 10 tracks of Dalia’s Mixtape were recorded by the BBC Symphony Orchestra, with each one released as an EP in the months leading up to the release of the album itself. To celebrate Dalia’s Mixtape, Stasevska takes us on a personal and insightful journey through each track.

Anna Meredith: Nautilus
“Anna Meredith’s Nautilus is very, very energizing. It’s trancelike and hypnotizes you completely. I heard the piece when Anna was performing with her band in Helsinki around four years ago. And I immediately thought that it would work fantastically for symphony orchestra.

“You need a different kind of attitude to play it. You can’t just play the notes, you have to feel like a rock musician. It’s very industrial and very powerful.”

Andrea Tarrodi: Wildwood
“Wildwood is inspired by the trees—how their roots grow deep into the ground and their branches reach up to the sky. But also this is about an inner forest. Andrea Tarrodi wrote the piece after the birth of her daughter, and says that this was how she felt. I can relate to that, because my own daughter is five months old, and that’s how you feel for the first time—really rooted to the earth.

“Wildwood is one of Tarrodi’s best pieces, and it has this really substantial and glorious arc to it.”

Judith Weir: Still, Glowing
“This piece is Judith Weir’s only take on ambient music, which I find really fascinating. It’s centered around a luminous and transparent string texture that gives you a feeling of being suspended in time.

“Occasionally, xylophone and woodwinds appear like a fleeting thought, like a cloud passing by. It’s a very slow moving, beautiful miniature movement.”

Caroline Shaw: The Observatory
“Caroline Shaw is one of the most important contemporary voices in our time. This piece is a cinematic work, a narrative adventure. It’s a kaleidoscopic journey from Hollywood's Griffith Park Observatory.

“There are some familiar musical references in the piece, such as Strauss’ Don Juan, Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No. 3, Sibelius’ Second Symphony, Brahms’ Symphony No. 1… It’s quite a ride. What I love about it is that is has a really strong pulsation throughout, like a city pulsating.”

Lauri Porra: Utu
“‘Utu’ is part of Lauri Porra’s suite Cabins & Hideouts, his personal musical diary recording days at his family’s Finnish summer cabin. Utu, the Finnish word for “mist,” takes place around sunset as the air starts to get colder during dusk. This thin layer of slow-moving white mist appears on the surface of the lake. It’s a very particular moment in the summer.

“What is so special about this piece is the instrumentation made up from a combination of natural string harmonics, low sustaining instruments, and bass clarinet. I’ve never heard anybody compose using harmonics in such a way that’s not simply an effect. It’s very meditative, and it takes you directly to the silence of Finnish summer nights.”

Jóhann Jóhannsson: They Being Dead Yet Speaketh
They Being Dead Yet Speaketh was originally written for a film called The Miners’ Hymns, a 2010 documentary film portrait of a mining community in Northeast England. Jóhannsson’s music brings together somber orchestral chords, ambient effects, and haunting brass textures in a nod to the celebrated colliery brass bands that were such an important part of mining culture.

“Jóhannsson’s music is deeply moving—it always seems to carry a very personal element. Does that also partly come from the landscape of Iceland, the secludedness and the rawness? There’s definitely some of all that in this score.”

Julius Eastman: Symphony No. II—The Faithful Friend: The Lover Friend’s Love for the Beloved
“Symphony No. II was only discovered a few years ago and had to be completely reconstructed. As I understand the history of this piece, it’s a love letter and a breakup letter, and Julius Eastman was not in a very good place when he wrote this. He was homeless, he had a lot of problems at the end of his life, so he probably wrote this piece while crashing on somebody’s couch somewhere with a piano.

“In my opinion, its unusual instrumentation is designed to create low and resonating drone sounds throughout the piece. It has a very special timbre to it—it’s very dark and really beautiful.”

SØS Gunver Ryberg: Coexistence
“Ryberg is a fascinating composer. She’s a sculptor of sound, and molds the sound of an orchestra like a synthesizer, concentrating more on effects than on harmonies or melodies. What is interesting and unique is the explosion of organic and electronic sounds when she puts it all together.”

Noriko Koide: Swaddling Silk and Gossamer Rain
“The title is really poetic, and what captivated me about this piece was how imaginative it is. There are some techniques in this piece that I’ve never seen or heard used before that are so captivating. The players not only mimic the sound of dropping water, but they also use a pencil between violin strings to create a kind of tapping sound.”

Julia Wolfe: Pretty “It was so important for me to have Wolfe on the album. In a way, she is the prototype for many of today’s composers. Her music often incorporates electric instruments such as electric guitar, but in this energetic and festive piece she wanted to challenge herself and only create her sounds from acoustic orchestral instruments.

“She uses so many instrument techniques, including quick tremolos and sliding on the fingerboard to mimic the sound of electric guitars. She even said in our rehearsal that we had to play some of the passages as if we were Jimi Hendrix. That inspired us so much.”

12 Tracks

August 15, 2024 at PDT

Thomas de Hartmann Rediscovered

When, six years ago, Joshua Bell first set eyes on a score of Thomas de Hartmann’s 1943 Violin Concerto he felt he was discovering a rare and neglected masterpiece. In its klezmer-inflected themes, he found a profoundly moving response to the Nazi occupation of the composer’s homeland Ukraine—an expression of anguish at the fate of its Jewish citizens that was yet hauntingly beautiful. “I was shocked that something so compelling had been written that I’d never heard of before,” Bell says. “Somehow this piece had slipped through the cracks, and yet it is one of the great 20th-century pieces for violin and orchestra. I just had to get it out there.”

With this in mind, Bell has teamed up with the Ukrainian INSO-Lviv Symphony Orchestra under the baton of the Finnish Ukrainian conductor Dalia Stasevska to perform and record de Hartmann’s Concerto. Taking place in Warsaw last year, amid the Russian war on Ukraine, the recording brought the players together at a time when they, too, were experiencing the fear and oppression that had inspired de Hartmann’s music.

Warsaw was considered close enough, and safe enough, for Stasevska’s players to get to from Lviv, “but still there were a lot of logistical problems,” Bell explains. “They had to queue at the Polish border for nine hours the day before—it took a lot to make it happen.”

But the fraught circumstances only seem to add to the passion heard here. From the outset, the deeply expressive qualities of de Hartmann’s Concerto are on display, beginning with brooding harmonies in the orchestra, out of which the solo violin rises with a melody filled with pathos. In many ways, Hartmann’s writing recalls the soundworld of Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich’s war-scarred works, and fans of English wartime composer William Walton will appreciate the haunting play of light-and-darkness heard here. “But the Concerto is not derivative in any way,” Bell says. “There’s a lot of 20th-century music that sounds painful and dissonant, but I think that’s easy to do compared to writing something like this which shows the pain of war with such incredible beauty.”

Another quality that attracts Bell to the Concerto is its concision. The piece is composed in four movements: the menacing motifs of the first-movement “Largo—Allegro” give way to a modally-inflected “Andante” theme and variations. A brief third movement, “Minuet fantasque,” evokes, as de Hartmann’s wife, Olga, once wrote, “a violinist wandering through the war-devastated Ukrainian steppes, playing his macabre and sorrowful songs,” before a Stravinskian outburst kicks off the folk-inspired vibrant final movement.

“The Concerto’s proportions are wonderful,” Bell says. “It’s got a beautiful slow movement. The ‘Minuet’ is cinematic, and takes you off on a journey before you get back to this intense last movement which has such an exciting ending. So it just delivers on every level; I find no weaknesses in it.”

Certainly de Hartmann writes well for the violin, exploiting its range and register fully with virtuosic ideas that sit nicely under the fingers. The Concerto also presents plenty of interpretative challenges for the soloist. “As a performer, there are different characters in the music that one needs to pay attention to,” Bell explains. “Early on in the piece, there’s despair and darkness, and then in the first movement’s second theme there’s something a little bit more sweet and pleading, maybe one might say feminine. With each of these tunes, you have to get inside a different kind of sound, and with the solo violin, that means using vibrato and varying the sound to create different moods.”

Born in 1884, de Hartmann learned his musical craft with the great Romantic Russian composers Anton Arensky and Sergei Taneyev before studying musical composition with Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov in pre-revolution St. Petersburg. It was while living in Garches, in the western suburbs of Nazi-occupied Paris, that he wrote the Violin Concerto, secretly dedicating it to the Jewish composer Ernest Bloch. Asked whether the music speaks to the plight of the Ukrainian people today, Bell says it’s not making a political point. “There’s a feeling of war and marching, and I do think you can feel this in the Concerto,” he says. “But in the end it’s simply moving, beautiful music.”

7 Tracks

March 7, 2024 at PST

Anna Meredith: Nautilus - Single

With Anna Meredith’s rhythmically propulsive Nautilus, Finnish conductor Dalia Stasevska launches her 10-track voyage to discover what the future holds for the symphony orchestra. Performed by the BBC Symphony Orchestra, the tracks that will eventually make up Dalia’s Mixtape are being released as a series of singles throughout 2024. In September, the collection will be complete and released as an album showcasing all 10 thrilling contemporary and 20th-century orchestral works.

“The orchestra is one of the greatest instruments ever created,” Stasevska tells Apple Music Classical, “but what does its future sound like, and how will it develop? We have an incredible history in classical music, but it’s also really important to discover new things, to listen to our surroundings and respond to them. And it’s important for me to challenge myself, as an artist.

“Anna Meredith’s Nautilus is very, very energizing,” says Stasevska. “It’s trance-like and hypnotizes you completely. I heard the piece when Anna was performing with her band in Helsinki around four years ago. And I immediately thought that it would work fantastically for symphony orchestra.

“You need a different kind of attitude to play it,” she adds. “You can’t just play the notes—you have to feel like a rock musician. It’s very industrial and very powerful.”

2 Tracks

May 25, 2023 at PDT

Rautavaara & Martinů: Piano Concertos No. 3

This remarkable recording features two concertos by composers who stylistically ploughed their own furrow. Finnish composer Rautavaara’s Piano Concerto No. 3 from 1998 is, despite its age, a post-Romantic work at heart, full of coruscating textures, dramatic flourishes, and eerie soundworlds.

In a similar way, Martinů’s own Third Piano Concerto, from 50 years earlier, couples intense lyricism with joyful bursts of modernism. Pianist Olli Mustonen brings customary sensitivity to both works while conductor Dalia Stasevska ekes out every detail from these astonishing scores.

6 Tracks

February 1, 2024 at PST

Stormskerry Maja (OST)

20 Tracks

April 18, 2024 at PDT

Matter and Time

Take an awe-inspiring musical ride from the Big Bang to the end of the universe.

10 Tracks

March 28, 2024 at PDT

Wildwood

Swedish composer Andrea Tarrodi’s Wildwood is the second track in Dalia Stasevska’s personal 10-work exploration into the future sound of the symphony orchestra. All 10 will be released in September 2024 as Dalia’s Mixtape.

“Wildwood is inspired by the trees—how their roots grow deep into the ground and their branches reach up to the sky,” Stasevska tells Apple Music Classical, “but also, this is about an inner forest. Andrea wrote the piece after the birth of her daughter, and says that this was how she felt. I can relate to that, because my own daughter is five months old, and that’s how you feel for the first time—really rooted to the earth.”

In the middle of the piece is a passage called “Corazón,” which means “Heart” in Spanish. “Andrea wrote this part as a lullaby for her daughter,” says Stasevska, “but you also hear this very low double bass that’s a little scary—being a parent is wonderful, but also scary at the same time.

“What’s interesting about Andrea Tarrodi is that her compositions are shaped by her synesthesia: she sees everything in colors. And she usually draws her compositions before starting to compose a single note. Before I even knew this, I always thought that Andrea was a great storyteller. She takes you to another world with her music. Wildwood is one of her best pieces and has this really substantial and glorious arc to it.”

2 Tracks

December 7, 2023 at PST

Leiviskä: Orchestral Works, Vol. 1

Helvi Leiviskä (1902-82), born some 50 years before Finland’s best-known female composer, Kaija Saariaho, has recently been emerging from the shadows. Her characterful and brilliantly orchestrated symphonies in particular have been winning her new fans. Here we have the premiere recording of Symphony No. 2, coupled with music from a landmark film. But we start with the work that has generally been acknowledged as her best-known.

Sinfonia brevis (1962), although a relatively late work, recalls Leiviskä’s studies in Vienna in the late 1920s. Its uncharacteristically sober instrumental palette—burnished browns rather than her usual bright and glittering colors—suggests both its serious intent in demonstrating Leiviskä’s compositional craft, and the influence of Brahms. Yet it ends with an effective roof-raising climax, stirringly fulfilled by the Lahti Symphony Orchestra conducted by Dalia Stasevska.

Much more typical of Leiviskä’s style are the Orchestral Suite No. 2, using music from her 1937 film score Juha, and Symphony No. 2, composed in 1954. Both works are far more deft and scintillating in their use of instrumental color, with touches here and there of Sibelius and Scriabin. While the Symphony appears the most consistently inspired of the two works with its airy fantasy and wraith-like finale, the Suite has an equally characteristic if quite different end with its darkly brooding “Epilogi.” Both are compellingly performed by Stasevska with her Finnish musicians.

8 Tracks

May 9, 2024 at PDT

Caroline Shaw: The Observatory - EP

First premiered by the Los Angeles Philharmonic in August 2019, Caroline Shaw’s orchestral work The Observatory (a reference to the Griffith Observatory that towers over Los Angeles to its north) is a kaleidoscopic, filmic journey. There are expansive textures, intimate episodes, and ear-teasing references to classical works, including Richard Strauss’ Don Juan and Sibelius’ Symphony No. 2. And, in homage to the live experience of classical music, Shaw plays with the arpeggiated motif that calls US concertgoers back to their seats post-interval.

It’s a work that’s alive with possibility and pulsing with energy. “Caroline Shaw is one of the most important contemporary voices in our time,” Dalia Stasevska tells Apple Music Classical. Shaw’s piece is part of Staveska’s album Dalia’s Mixtape that showcases innovative, far-reaching works for orchestra. “This piece is quite a ride,” she continues. “What I love about this piece is that is has a really strong pulsation throughout. It’s like a city pulsating.”

2 Tracks

April 11, 2024 at PDT

Swaddling Silk and Gossamer Rain - EP

From the opening, shimmering vibraphone to the players’ subtle vocalizations of rain sounds and ethereal use of piano and harp, Japanese composer Noriko Koide’s Swaddling Silk and Gossamer Rain is mesmerizingly descriptive. “The title is really poetical, and what captivated me about this piece was how imaginative it was,” conductor Dalia Stasevska tells Apple Music Classical.

“There are some techniques in this piece that I’ve never seen or heard used before that are so captivating. The players not only mimic the sound of dropping water, but they also use a pencil between violin strings as kind of like a tapping sound.”

Throughout the piece, and in the final bars as the rain subsides, Koide makes beautiful use of silence, says Stasevska, which is as much a part of this work as its captivating soundworld. “For Koide, silence is music,” she says. “Every single silent moment is a musical moment—it’s a very meditative piece.”

2 Tracks

June 13, 2024 at PDT

Jóhann Jóhannsson: They Being Dead Yet Speaketh (from Miners' Hymns) - EP

4 Tracks

August 8, 2024 at PDT

COEXISTENCE - EP

Low growls on woodwind and brass cast ominous shadows at the start of SØS Gunver Ryberg’s 2022 Coexistence, a commentary on the nature of creation and destruction. Within the space of a minute, the music coalesces into a colossal wall of sound, layers piled upon layers, orchestral sections jostling for attention. This extreme intensity soon gives way to a collage of textures: shrieking strings, fiery brass, thundering percussion, and oases of calm. “Ryberg is a fascinating composer,” conductor Dalia Stasevska tells Apple Music Classical. “She’s a sculptor of sound, and molds the sound of an orchestra like a synthesizer, concentrating more on effects than on harmonies or melodies.”

In the music’s final few minutes, Ryberg combines the incessant drumming of bow-wood on strings with flutter-tongued flutes and bass drum rolls, and brings Coexistence to an uncertain end, woodwind and brass halted as if midsentence.

2 Tracks

July 11, 2024 at PDT

Judith Weir: Still, Glowing - EP

Dame Judith Weir’s Still, Glowing is not entirely typical of her work, explains conductor Dalia Stasevska. “It’s her only take on ambient music, which I find really fascinating,” she tells Apple Music Classical. “I think the title describes the piece really well,” she continues, “it’s centered around a luminous and transparent string texture that gives you a feeling of being suspended in time.”

Still, Glowing, composed in 2008, is based on a chord sequence from Weir’s 1990 opera The Vanishing Bridegroom. Its opening chord, tonally uncertain, radiates a soft energy that permeates the entire piece. “Occasionally, xylophone and woodwinds appear like a fleeting thought through your mind,” says Stasevska. “It’s like a cloud passing by, but you notice it’s passed by only after some time. It’s a very slow moving, beautiful miniature movement.”

2 Tracks

August 22, 2024 at PDT

Julius Eastman: Symphony No. II - The Faithful Friend: The Lover Friend's Love for the Beloved

Julius Eastman completed his one-movement orchestral work Symphony No. II—The Faithful Friend: The Lover Friend’s Love for the Beloved in 1983. The American composer creates huge, otherworldly soundscapes from full orchestra bolstered by unusually large bass forces including three bassoons, three bass clarinets, three tubas, three contrabass clarinets, and six timpani.

Reconstructed from a hand-written score, the Symphony explores the pain of lost love, in particular between Eastman and his partner. “It’s a break-up letter,” conductor Dalia Staveska tells Apple Music Classical; “Eastman was not in a very good place when he wrote this—he was homeless and he had a lot of problems at the end of his life and probably wrote this piece while crashing on somebody’s couch somewhere with a piano.

“In my opinion, its unusual instrumentation is designed to create low and resonating drone sounds throughout the piece. It has a very special timbre to it—it’s very, very dark and really beautiful.”

The process of reviving Eastman’s music has been compounded by the composer’s idiosyncratic notation methods, making it difficult to interpret accurately his musical intentions. So this performance is a major contribution to the Eastman cause. “This is music that has been forgotten and neglected for years,” says Stasevska, “and I hope that everybody will get a little bit inspired to discover more of who Julius Eastman was, his music, and his life.”

2 Tracks

July 25, 2024 at PDT

Lauri Porra: Utu - EP

Finnish heavy metal guitarist and composer Lauri Porra’s atmospheric orchestral miniature “Utu” (“Mist”) is taken from Cabins & Hideouts, a suite of movements describing his family’s summer nights at a cabin in the Finnish countryside. “It takes place around sunset as the air starts to get colder around dusk,” says Stasevska, who as Porra’s wife is part of that family, and has experienced this phenomenon firsthand. “This thin layer of slow-moving white mist appears on the surface of the lake—it’s a unique moment in the summer.”

Porra scores “Utu” using a combination of string harmonics, low sustaining instruments, and bass clarinet. “I’ve never actually heard anybody compose using harmonics in such a way that’s not simply an effect,” adds Stasevska. “It’s very meditative, and it takes you directly to the silence of Finnish summer nights.”

2 Tracks

May 2, 2024 at PDT

Aineen ja ajan messu

10 Tracks

August 29, 2024 at PDT

Julia Wolfe: Pretty

2 Tracks