5 March. By Sally Glaetzer.
Between rehearsals, we caught up with Eivind and TSO musicians Jenny Owen and Lloyd Hudson across the road from our concert hall at Hobart Brewing Company.
In this video chat, Jenny, Lloyd and Eivind discuss the busy month ahead for Eivind and the orchestra (six concerts in five weeks!).
Jenny and Lloyd find out what Eivind got up to over the Norwegian winter and learn about his fascinating connection with the composer Grieg.
And they discover that our Chief has another very impressive string to his bow – speed skating!
Read the interview transcript below, or click on the videos to watch each short snippet.
TSO musicians Jenny and Lloyd discover Eivind's other impressive skill.
Jenny: Hi Eivind, what did you get up to over the Norwegian winter while we were enjoying the Tasmanian summer?
Eivind: I was in Oslo, we had a nice family Christmas and for once I had some time off. When I have time off I don't have to do a lot of things. I'm happy to live a quiet life. I enjoy cooking, I go to some exhibitions. I read books. I try to stay in shape, exercise.
Jenny: Do you ski?
Eivind: I do ski, although skating was my big sport, ice skating, speed skating. I used to be the champion of Bergen (in Norway) for my age group when I grew up. So this was very big when I was a kid.
Jenny: Did you have to give up speed skating to be a violinist?
Eivind: Actually, it sounds like a cliche, but it's kind of true! When I got more into music, then, of course, not so much time to skate. And it was the violin after that.
Lloyd: You do look very relaxed. Sometimes you've arrived and we've thought, as an orchestra, ‘We're in for it’, but you look very relaxed this time. Does that mean that you've had your feet up the whole time at home?
Eivind: Not exactly! I've done some work, which I really enjoyed, with young people, including a couple of master classes with young conductors.
We have a really fantastic program in Norway where young conductors get to conduct a professional orchestra for a weekend once a month – with a really good orchestra too.
They (young conductors) start about age 14 and it's excellent for them to start before they realise how difficult it is!
Then I did a big youth orchestra project with students from the Norwegian Academy and from a private academy. Once a year, they put together a big orchestra – we had 18 first violins, and we did Shostakovich 10.
It's a lot of work, but the end result is terrific.
Hear about Eivind's work with young conductors and musicians over the European winter.
Jenny: Coming up we have the 6pm Series concert (Dance Macabre, 13 March), that you’re conducting, and that’s got Jabra Latham’s new saxophone concerto in it, with Jabra playing. That’s going to be exciting.
Eivind: That is exciting, it's a terrific piece, with big writing. He (Jabra) likes his big deep bass lines and full orchestral sound. You have his tenor saxophone going in and out of the orchestral texture and it builds over a long time to terrific climaxes.
He makes a relatively modest orchestra size sound very, very big.
To have a composer as soloist, is not so normal anymore. If you go 100 years back, they were mostly performers as well composers, but not so much today.
And what a performer he (Jabra) is. He’s a big personality on stage.
Eivind waxes lyrical about Jabra Latham's new saxophone concerto.
Jenny: You’re here in Hobart for five weeks. What else are you looking forward to?
Eivind: There is a very big variation in programs over the next five weeks. I've made sure that all sections of the orchestra get a break from my face!
We have a String program, we have a Brass program – so you won't all be stuck with me for five weeks (Jenny: Thank goodness for that!).
Lloyd: I had a beer with Dave Robins, our Principal Trombone and he is super excited about the brass and percussion program coming up (Brass in St David’s 21 March). I think this is the second one of these that you’ve conducted?
Eivind: Yes, I've done one Brass in St David’s before, and I think St David’s Cathedral is a perfect venue for a brass concert. It's beautiful in there.
Some of the music was written for the church. We’ll play two canzones by Gabrieli, written for the wonderful San Marco (Basilica) in Venice, which is meant to be played from the galleries with two groups playing against each other. So we hope we can recreate some of some of that.
Jenny, Eivind and Lloyd discuss the joys and challenges of playing in St David's Cathedral.
Lloyd: Should we get to the most unusual concert of the season, when our normally 47-member orchestra almost doubles in size?
Eivind: Yes, at the end of the month, Four Last Songs (29 March) is a program that I'm looking very much forward to with Richard Strauss and Ravel.
They are composers who lived at the same time - Ravel was born after Strauss and died before Strauss.
We’re playing Daphnis et Chloé (by Ravel), which I think is the most perfect tone poem ever written.
It's brilliant orchestration. It starts with the sunrise, and then the love story between the two, until the wild dance at the end.
Eivind, Jenny and Lloyd look forward to Four Last Sings on 28 March (TIP: play to the end to enjoy the trio's tabletop rendition of Ravel's Bolero!).
Jenny: Huge parts for flute in Daphnis et Chloé …
Lloyd: Huge parts! I've studied that flute solo endlessly, but I feel bad that I don't actually know what it's about.
Eivind: It’s a big love story really. And Don Juan (by Strauss), I don’t know if you can say that’s about love but it’s about men and women. And to open the concert, we play the four last songs that Richard Strauss wrote. His four last songs are so beautiful, and I have to add that they were written for and premiered by a Norwegian, Kirsten Flagstad. And then we finish the concert with Bolero, which is known to everybody and that should be a special evening.
Jenny: There is a little bit of a Norwegian theme across our Season 2025. We’ll be playing Grieg’s Holberg Suite in our TSO Strings concerts in Sorell and Kingston, and of course Peer Gynt in July.
Eivind: I grew up with Grieg’s music, so I like to bring some of his music to every season here with the TSO. I have recorded all of his symphonic works and it’s only five CDs so we have to distribute that through the different seasons.
He was from Bergen, my city, and when I grew up I used to go to his villa outside of the city and I played I don’t know how many times in concerts in what was his living room.
So maybe that’s why I like bringing some of his music here, I grew up with it.
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