Composer: Martinsson, Rolf (b. 1956)

Santtu-Matias Rouvali is an exciting conductor to watch, totally at home in the all-nordic repertoire of Sibelius and Martinsson, in whose concerto Håkan Hardenberger displayed his total mastery of the trumpet.

Soprano Lisa Larsson and pianist Roland Pöntinen dispelled the midwinter gloom with a heavy dose of Scandinavian Romanticism and the Dutch première of Rolf Martinsson's Songs on Poems by Emily Dickinson.

After a very successful week on location in Cleveland’s west side Gordon Square neighborhood playing concerts in bars, coffee shops, school classrooms and a large Roman Catholic church, The Cleveland Orchestra returned to their Severance Hall home for the last weekend of concerts of the 2012/13 subscription season.

Perelman Stage at Carnegie Hall is by no means a modest-sized concert stage, and the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra seemed to take up every square inch of it. The sheer size of the orchestra is initially what struck me, until the opening lines of Rolf Martinsson’s Open Mind, Op. 71.