Award winning cellist Amalie Stalheim (b. 1993) is known for her technical brilliance, personal expression and unique tone and has appeared as a soloist with orchestras such as the Gulbenkian Orchestra, Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra, Oulu Symphony Orchestra, the Norwegian Radio Orchestra, Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra, the Swedish Radio Orchestra, Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra and Iceland Symphony Orchestra.

This recital brings together two established classics from the 20th century with lesser-known works from the repertoire for violin and piano. Alongside Ravel’s Sonata, a work that reveals the influence of jazz on the French composer, and Prokofiev’s wartime Sonata, Op. 94a, an idiomatic arrangement of its original version for flute, we find compositions by Arvo Pärt, Lili Boulanger and Grażyna Bacewicz, which, at times meditative, at times lyrical, at times folk-inspired, testify to the richness of this repertoire.

Saint-Saëns's chamber music broke new ground in France at a time when public taste tended to favour opera and opéra-comique. His first Sonata for violin and piano, one of the earliest composed in France, is a masterpiece of boundless beauty. Its emotional impact and its highly poetic content are served by the composer’s perfect mastery of formal architecture. (It has also been proposed as the model for the ‘Vinteuil Sonata’ which runs through Marcel Proust's novel cycle ‘In Search of Lost Time’.) The second Sonata, composed in Egypt, is very different from its predecessor: more serious, classical, and intimate. While the writing is more melodic, the composer prophesied that the sonata would not be understood “until the eighth hearing”.

After several challenging years, marked by the pandemic and a harsh political climate, we fortunately have musical treasures we can unearth. This is precisely what the Norwegian Wind Ensemble has done. This spring, they present two masterful pieces of music that deserve the full attention of an interested listener.