Most popular baroque music at season concert on 14th of March

Published 08.03.2024

KSO will be led by early music specialist Kreeta-Maria Kentala

The Kuopio Symphony Orchestra’s Spring Baroque season concert on Thursday 14th of March at 6 pm offers the audience the most colourful orchestral music of the Baroque era. The concert held at the Kuopio Music Center begins with Giovanni Gabrieli’s Sonata pian’e forte performed by the KSO brass from different sides of the Concert Hall, after which the concert continues with Heinrich Ignaz Franz Biber’s Die Pauern Kirchfahrt, Johann David Heinichen’s Concerto Grosso, Antonio Vivaldi’s eternally wonderful Spring and Georg Friedrich Handel’s joyous Water Music. The orchestra is led by Kreeta-Maria Kentala, a specialist in early music and violinist.

The KSO’s season concert on the 14th of March contains spring baroque music: birds singing, thunderstorms, peasants on their way to church and sparkling fireworks. Giovanni Gabrieli’s Sonata pian´e forte, published in 1597, will be heard as a grand opening number, which gives an example of the terrace dynamics of baroque music. The piece is performed by the brass ensemble of the orchestra, which is divided into two choirs playing from different sides of the hall.

Heinrich Ignaz Franz Biber’s Die Pauern Kirchfahrt describes the gathering of people in a church and the peasants’ dancing procession to the village tavern. “Finally, we get back home to the fireplace,” Kreeta-Maria Kentala describes. The musical journey continues with Johann David Heinichen’s Concerto Grosso. “Heinichen wrote enormously colourful music, often like the Concerto grossos in such a way that there is a group of soloists, which can include almost any instruments, this time violin, oboe and flute as a counterpart to a really magnificent orchestral batch,” says Kentala.

After the intermission, we will hear Antonio Vivaldi’s Spring, which belongs to Vivaldi’s almost 600 concertos and the best-known Four Seasons series. The piece, published in 1725, represents the pinnacle of violin skill of its time, and Vivaldi composed it for himself as a virtuoso piece. The concert ends with Georg Friedrich Handel’s Water Music commissioned by King George I, which was premiered in 1717 on the deck of a barge while the guests sat in their own boats.

The award-winning violinist Kreeta-Maria Kentala is known as a pioneer in the Finnish movement for early music. She is at home as a soloist, leader and pedagogue in baroque, classical and romantic music as well as folk music. Kentala has worked as an orchestra musician in the Radio Symphony Orchestra and as a baroque musician in the Musica Antiqua Köln Ensemble. She is a sought-after instructor of orchestral musicians and instrument pedagogues.

Before the concert, at 5:30 pm at the Hall of Light, Lev Berkovskiy, the violinist of the KSO will introduce the baroque instrument violoncello da spalla. The event is open to all, free entrance.

Tickets: 33 € / 27 € senior citizens and groups min. 20 persons / 11 € children under the age of 16 and students / 4 € concert day discount ticket for students and young people under the age of 20.

KUOPIO SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA
Producer & Publicity Manager Elina Prepula, tel. 044 718 2364, elina.prepula(at)kuopio.fi
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