Participants

• Omer Meir Wellber, conductor
• Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra
• Swedish Radio Choir

Works

• Mikael Karlsson & Anna von Hausswolff: Grand Guignol 42 min (final orchestration by Michael P. Atkinson)
• Claude Debussy: Nocturnes 25 min
• Alexander Skriabin: Poème de l’extase, Op. 54 22 min

Grand Guignol is based on a type of theatre that was born at the Théâtre du Grand Guignol in the Pigalle district of Paris in the 19th century. The primary function of these innovative and popular plays was to make the audience sensuously awaken from the mundaneness of everyday life and experience shocking, frightening, seductive, carnal and hypnotic stories that were not accepted in the high culture of the time.

Anna von Hausswolff and Mikael Karlsson have composed a piece for the Radio Symphony Orchestra and the Radio Choir that celebrates the uplifting powers of darkness and that, in the Grand Guignol tradition, embraces stories and sounds that call us to places we reflexively flee from. There, in the borderland between physical, ritual music and the tickling allure of the darkest stories, we encounter Grand Guignol.

The piece uses pulsating intensity and alternating waves of calm and aggression to create a space through text, music, and electronics in surround where great emotions and sensual liberation are at the center and where the terrible and the beautiful are embraced on equal terms – an aesthetic that characterizes both composers’ previous music.