Hans Christian Andersen’s Musical Journey with Trio con Brio

With: Søren Sætter-Lassen, actor · Trio con Brio Copenhagen, piano trio

Program
En Digters Bazar (A Poet’s Bazaar) – a concert narrative with Søren Sætter-Lassen and Trio con Brio Copenhagen

Join actor Søren Sætter-Lassen and Trio con Brio on a richly spiced musical journey to the Orient and back, following in the footsteps of Denmark’s great fairytale writer Hans Christian Andersen. “To travel is to live,” runs one of his most famous quotations – and Andersen practised what he preached, spending more than seven years of his life abroad. In 1840–41, driven by restless curiosity and a thirst for discovery, he set out on the greatest adventure of his life: a journey all the way to the Orient, as one of the very first Danes to do so.

The vivid details of that eventful expedition were preserved as reportage, essays and short tales in the book A Poet’s Bazaar, which in this concert is brought to life by Søren Sætter-Lassen. With his finely chiselled diction, he paints Andersen’s remarkable journey in a thousand colours, conjuring both the outer landscapes and the inner transformations of the writer.

A Poet’s Bazaar offers a striking snapshot of a Europe in flux, and beneath its almost journalistic surface one senses a profound inner turning point – a release that helped shape Andersen as the great storyteller he would become. One of the world’s leading piano trios, Trio con Brio, gives musical voice to the journey with drama, humour and an abundance of exotic colour. The programme includes the trio’s own virtuoso arrangements of Stravinsky’s electrifying The Rite of Spring and Rimsky-Korsakov’s beloved Scheherazade, with its yearning solo violin at the centre, alongside piano trios by Mendelssohn and Charles Ives.

We are also treated to a piano solo of the finest calibre, as Jens Elvekjær launches into Liszt’s daredevil Dance infernale and movements from Schumann’s hyper-romantic Carnaval. Experience for yourself the emotions, atmospheres and dramatic forces that helped shape Denmark’s national poet in a concert that speaks to all the senses.