Mari Samuelson
SPHERE
The Eternal Earth
Ottawa, Ontario
Presented by
National Arts Centre
The NAC Orchestra honours the Earth and the perseverance of life against increasingly difficult odds by performing works from three very different composers: Outi Tarkiainen, Max Richter and Alexina Louie.
Outi Tarkiainen is a Finnish composer of “rare moral conviction and geographical attachment” (gramophone.co.uk). Her captivating work, The Earth, Spring’s Daughter, is set in the language of the Sámi people, the reindeer-herding communities of northern Norway, Sweden, and Finland—and the last remaining Indigenous people in Europe.To hear German-British composer Max Richter’s The Four Seasons Recomposed is to be swept up in the passionate urgency of nature, its mysteries and joys and the delicate persistence of the seasons on our planet. In this remarkable work, Vivaldi has spoken and Richter has answered with ferocious love for the robust but increasingly precarious nature of life on Earth. A passionate champion of contemporary work, Norwegian violinist Mari Samuelsen makes her Canadian debut with this performance.The Eternal Earth, by JUNO Award-winning composer and great friend of the NAC Orchestra Alexina Louie, closes the program. Commissioned by Sir Andrew Davis for the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, The Eternal Earth embraces the pure sounds of nature, from the lion’s roar to the seagull’s cry.This concert is presented as part of the NAC Orchestra’s SPHERE Festival.
The event will be also be livestreamed to audiences with no tickets required.
Outi Tarkianen was born in Rovaniemi in Finnish Lapland, a place that has proved a constant source of inspiration for her. She has long been drawn to the expressive power of the human voice, but has written vocal, chamber, and solo instrumental works as well as works for orchestra and soloist. “I see music as a force of nature that can flood over a person and even change entire destinies,” she once said.
Outi has been commissioned by orchestras including the San Francisco Symphony, BBC Symphony, BBC Philharmonic, Royal Stockholm Philharmonic, and Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestras, and her music has been taken up by the symphony orchestras of St Louis, Detroit, and Houston, among others. Her early work with jazz orchestras culminated in Into the Woodland Silence (2013), a score that combined the composer’s sense of natural mysticism with the distinctive textures of the jazz orchestra tradition. Major works since include an orchestral song cycle to texts by Sami poets The Earth, Spring’s Daughter (2015), the saxophone concerto Saivo (2016, nominated for the Nordic Council Music Prize), and Midnight Sun Variations premiered at the BBC Proms in 2019 (nominated for the Fondation Prince Pierre de Monaco’s Musical Composition Prize). Her first full-length opera, A Room of One’s Own (2021), was commissioned and premiered by Theater Hagen in Germany.
Outi studied composition at the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki, the Guildhall School in London and at the University of Miami. She has been composer-in-residence at the Festival de Musique Classique d’Uzerche in France and was for four years co-artistic director of the Silence Festival in Lapland.
In Mari Samuelsen’s musical universe there are no barriers between the music of such contemporary composers as Max Richter or Arvo Pärt and that of Bach, Beethoven and Vivaldi. With her breathtaking artistry and adventurous approach to programming and presentation, Samuelsen inspires audiences worldwide. The Norwegian violinist’s emotionally charged style of playing, backed by an immaculate technique and searching intelligence, makes her broad repertoire even more captivating to listen to.
Born in 1984 in the town of Hamar, which lies south of the Olympic city of Lillehammer, on the shores of Norway’s largest lake, Mari Samuelsen received her first violin lessons at the age of three and continued her studies with Arve Tellefsen. From an early age she performed with her cellist brother Håkon, with whom she later made duo appearances around the world. At the age of 14 Mari enrolled at Oslo’s prestigious Barratt Due Institute of Music, and she later continued her studies for nearly a decade with Professor Zakhar Bron at the University of the Arts in Zurich.
Now in demand worldwide as concerto soloist and recitalist, Mari Samuelsen has performed at such leading venues as New York’s Carnegie Hall, the Paris Philharmonie and the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, the Berlin Konzerthaus, Geneva’s Victoria Hall, the Tonhalle Zurich, London’s Barbican and the Hollywood Bowl. She gave the world premiere of James Horner’s double concerto for violin, cello and orchestra in November 2014, and recorded the work as the centrepiece of Pas de Deux, released on Mercury Classics (Universal Music). Her first solo recording, Nordic Noir, was an album of the kind of hauntingly atmospheric music known from TV series such as The Killing, The Bridge and Broadchurch. Both albums were hits in the Norwegian pop charts (reaching the No. 1 and No. 2 spots respectively).
