Erik Højsgaard has influenced Danish musical life for decades. As a composer, he has written works for both national and international ensembles, and his compositions have been performed worldwide. Now, Athelas celebrates a composer who stands among the most significant of his generation, as they present a portrait concert featuring two of Erik Højsgaard's major works and the premiere of a brand-new piece commissioned by Athelas.
The new work, Please accept a Sunset, is a series of orchestral songs for soprano and sinfonietta, built around a collection of text fragments from a broad range of poets. At the heart of the piece is a poem by the American poet Emily Dickinson, with whom Højsgaard has had a special connection since 1976, when he first set one of her poems to music. Dickinson likely wrote the featured poem for one of her acquaintances, a botany professor at her hometown university in Amherst. In a letter to him, she accompanied the poem with the wonderfully poetic words, Please accept a sunset, which gave the piece its title.
The concert also features the works Four Sketches and Essays I-V; two pieces that, despite their modest titles, rank among the most significant in Højsgaard's output. Four Sketches indeed began as a sort of sketch for what is perhaps Højsgaard's most famous work, the opera Don Juan Returns from the War, but it quickly developed into its own distinct musical identity. Essays I-V was written on commission from Athelas and premiered in 2022. The work is inspired by the Russian-born writer Joseph Brodsky's essays on Venice – a city Højsgaard is particularly fond of. The piece is, in itself, a kind of musical essay collection, poetically revolving around the Italian city, where the immense magnitude of history is felt everywhere: "water is an image of time," as Brodsky puts it.
The concert takes place on Saturday 5 October at 16:00 in Koncertkirken, Copenhagen.