Brussels Philharmonic & Viktor Orri Árnason

A very warm welcome to Klarafestival!

Flanders Festival Brussels, Klara and our partners are delighted to greet you once again. “I believe audiences aren’t just listening. They are actively contributing”, festival artist Barbara Hannigan remarked in an interview. Concerts are an interaction between the audience, artists and anyone who is contributing to those magic moments in front of or behind the scenes. Together we ‘become’ music. 

As a conductor and soprano, Hannigan is a global reference point. With her, classical music becomes a contemporary and unique experience. This is an inspiration to Klarafestival as the largest broadcast festival in Belgium. Her versatile talent is sure to enrapture you, as is that of the many Belgian and international artists who connect past and present with musical stories.

Klarafestival opens in style with Hannigan as conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra. After that, you will hear and see her with young musicians from her mentorship project Equilibrium Young Artists. In no fewer than 25 concerts, we present top talent including Les Talens Lyriques, the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra with Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla and Vilde Frang, and the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra with Víkingur Ólafsson. Klarafestival also treasures creation. The film concert Reich/Richter as a symbiosis of Gerhard Richter’s paintings and the music of Steve Reich; the creation Counterforces by composer Frederik Croene to text by poet Dominique de Groen; and the music theatre production Prey by Kris Verdonck with a composition by Annelies Van Parys will surprise you!

This and all other concerts are possible thanks to the collaboration with our cultural partners: Bozar, Flagey, Kaaitheater, Théâtre Varia, Muntpunt, Concertgebouw Brugge and DE SINGEL. Thanks to our private partners KPMG, Proximus, Brewery Omer Vander Ghinste, Belfius, Interparking and the players of Belgium’s National Lottery. We are grateful for the support of the Flemish Community and the Brussels Capital Region. And finally, thanks to Klara and VRT: there would be no broadcast festival without their valued collaboration.

Joost Fonteyne

Intendant Klarafestival

Last and First Men

The idea first came to Jóhann Jóhannsson in 2010. Back then, the Icelandic composer had been releasing music as a solo artist for just over ten years, crafting haunting, elegiac concept albums about lost utopias that combined weeping orchestral arrangements with subtle, pattering electronics and impassive disembodied voices. He’d simultaneously been composing soundtracks for film and TV, and directing Super 8 and 16mm shorts that he projected at his concerts. He also found himself wondering when he’d ever get to make that grand movie of his own. ‘I’d never really found an idea that propelled me,’ he said, ‘and then I saw it. The idea. There. Fully formed.’ The idea was contained within the pages of a 2010 art book by the Dutch photographer Jan Kempenaers. Entitled Spomenik, Kempenaers’ book contained glossy full-colour prints of the huge, brutalist war memorials erected in the former Republic of Yugoslavia between the 1960s and the 1980s, but no accompanying text. 

Jóhannsson immersed himself in research. ‘Spomeniks were commissioned by Marshal Tito, the dictator and creator of Yugoslavia,’ he explained. ‘Tito constructed this artificial state, a utopian experiment uniting these Slavic nations, despite their different religions. The spomeniks were intended as symbols of unification. The architects couldn’t use religious iconography, so instead, they looked to prehistoric, Mayan and Sumerian art. That’s why they look so alien and otherworldly.’ Jóhannsson became fascinated by the symbolic complexity of the spomeniks. War monuments built on the site of massacres and concentration camps, spomeniks often had significantly different meanings depending on whether you were Serb or Croat. ‘Nothing is simple in that region,’ explained Jóhannsson. ‘Each spomenik had layers and layers of cultural complexity, which fascinates me relentlessly.’ 

With the esteemed Norwegian cinematographer Sturla Brandth Grøvlen in tow, Jóhannsson spent a month travelling through the Balkans, filming the spomeniks on 16mm black-and-white film. Using a motorised zoom, and a small dolly to move the camera slowly and precisely across the surface of the structures, Grøvlen and Jóhannsson shot in available light, primarily in the ‘golden hours’ of dawn and dusk, and almost entirely against the sky, in order to show little other than the monuments, the sun, the clouds, and the surrounding nature.

Aside from the Best Film Score Golden Globe he picked up in 2015 for James Marsh’s The Theory of Everything, Jóhannsson was probably best known during his short lifetime for his eerily beautiful concept albums (Fordlandia, IBM 1401, A User’s Manual), and his tense, exhilarating soundtracks to Denis Villeneuve’s psychological thrillers, such as Prisoners (2013), Sicario (2015) and the science-fiction masterpiece Arrival (2016). While there are some parallels with the ruminations about the nonlinear perception of time that infuse Arrival, the film of Last and First Men is a very different beast from Villeneuve’s work, though science fiction history runs in its blood. Using 16mm film scanned in high definition, the black-and-white footage recalls the sci-fi cinema of the 1960s and 1970s, the slow, deliberate movement of the camera across the massive spaceship exteriors in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, Douglas Trumbull’s Silent Running and Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris. 

Jóhannsson also cited the influence of Fred Kelemen’s crawling dolly movements in Béla Tarr and Ágnes Hranitzky’s The Man from London and The Turin Horse. ‘We wanted to film these sculptures in a very formalistic manner,’ said Jóhannsson, ‘to emphasise their strange asymmetrical beauty. We woke every morning at four o’clock to be ready for the sunrise and stayed outside filming all day until there was no light. It was one of the most happy experiences in my life, and one of the most gruelling.’ 

As a composer who has worked on movie soundtracks since 2000, Jóhannsson knew the next stage would be the music, but he also knew that just simply adding a score to these images would be too easy. He wanted to infuse the whole experience with another layer of narrative. Again, he gravitated towards science fiction. ‘I’m a huge fan of the Soviet writers,’ explained Jóhannsson. ‘Stanislaw Lem and the Strugatsky brothers. One huge influence on them was Olaf Stapledon.’ Of all the books he revisited, Jóhannsson was most struck by Stapledon’s 1930 debut Last and First Men, a history of the solar system across two billion years. ‘Like the anthropology of the future, written in this mix of mystical lyricism and cold academic text.’ It’s a powerful, peculiarly hypnotic work simultaneously poetic and dispassionate, and Jóhannsson knew exactly the right person to narrate the words: Tilda Swinton.

‘I wanted it to be read like someone reading from a manual. From the very first moment, I knew it just had to be Tilda. I wanted her narration to sound like a strange academic lecture, tinged with a melancholy lyricism, an authoritative voice from the future. I was also influenced by the measured, rather solemn readings of literary works that were the staple of Icelandic national radio when I was growing up.’ Recorded near her home in the Scottish Highlands, Swinton’s voice brings an exquisite valedictory sadness to Stapledon’s words, as her voice itself is dying as it narrates the earth’s final document of record.

Arriving at this point, Jóhannsson said, had been a tremendous challenge, but that was also what kept him going. ‘I think Last and First Men will live on in many different incarnations’, he said. ‘It’s a big ask for people to sit for 70 minutes and look at concrete and hear about the end of humanity, but hopefully we’ve taken all these elements and made something beautiful and poignant. Something like a requiem.’

These liner notes are based on an interview by Andrew Male with Jóhann Jóhannsson on the occasion of the work’s 2017 premiere in Manchester.

Jóhann Jóhannsson

Jóhann Jóhannsson (1969–2018) was a prolific composer, who wrote music for a wide array of media including theatre, dance, television and films. A great deal of his work in his last years had been closely entwined with film. He scored a number of major cinematic hits, including Denis Villeneuve’s Prisoners (2013), Sicario (2015) and Arrival (2016), and James Marsh’s The Theory of Everything (2014). Beyond scoring films, Jóhannsson directed them as well: his debut short, End of Summer, premiered in 2015 and was followed by Last and First Men, which premiered at the Manchester International Festival in 2017.

Viktor Orri Árnason 

Viktor Orri Árnason is an Icelandic composer, conductor and producer. His particular focus on colliding the worlds of classical composition and studio artistry – along with his unique approach to the viola and violin – has established him as an exceptional voice in today’s musical landscape. He has played the strings, conducted, and created arrangements for Jóhann Jóhannsson, Ólafur Arnalds and Björk, among many others. In 2021 he released his solo debut record Eilífur with PENTATONE. That same year, he became the conductor and artistic director for the Reykjavík Recording Orchestra.

Brussels Philharmonic

The Brussels Philharmonic was founded in 1935 by the Belgian public broadcaster (INR/NIR). The orchestra is known to be a pioneer in performing contemporary music – a reputation that brought world-renowned composers such as Bartók, Stravinsky and Messiaen to Brussels. To this day, the Brussels Philharmonic is continuing this tradition, including a 21st-century work in almost every concert programme. The orchestra rehearses and performs in Flagey in Brussels, which serves as its home base for concerts in Belgium and the rest of the world.

Else Torp

Else Torp  initially specialised in early music, but is today also recognised as a leading soprano in many genres of new music. She has been featured with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, Danish regional orchestras, Gulbenkian Orchestra, Concerto Copenhagen, Lautten Compagney Berlin and the Kronos Quartet. She also enjoys singing an extensive repertoire of German and Danish Lieder, and presenting exotic works such as William Walton’s Façade, Judith Weir’s one-voice opera King Harald’s Saga, and Stockhausen’s American Indian Songs.

Kate Macoboy

Australian soprano Kate Macoboy is an experienced ensemble singer and soloist. Embracing a broad repertoire, she performs in the UK, Europe and Australia with leading choirs Ars Nova Copenhagen and Chamber Choir Ireland, under the direction of Paul Hillier. She also sings regularly with a number of professional church choirs in London and has engagements with Theatre of Voices and the Danish National Vocal Ensemble. With Theatre of Voices, she featured in the world premiere of Jóhann Jóhannsson’s Last and First Men.

Conductor

Viktor Orri Árnason

Concertmaster

Henry Raudales 

Violin 1

Nadja Nevolovitsch (1), Bart Lemmens (2), Olivia Bergeot, Annelies Broeckhoven, Cristina Constantinescu, Francisco Dourthé Orrego, Justine Rigutto, Cristina Rimkeviciute, Anton Skakun, Elizaveta Rybentseva, Alissa Vaitsner, Gillis Veldeman

Violin 2 

Mari Hagiwara (1), Alexis Delporte, Aline Janeczek, Mireille Kovac, 

Eléonore Malaboeuf, Sayoko Mundy, Eline Pauwels, Julien Poli, Stefanie Van Backlé

Viola 

Mihai Cocea (1), Griet François (2), Philippe Allard, Marina Barskaya, Hélène Koerver, Agnieszka Kosakowska, Stephan Uelpenich, Patricia Van Reusel

Cello

Kristaps Bergs (1), Kirsten Andersen, Barbara Gerarts, Julius Himmler, Sophie Jomard, Emmanuel Tondus, Elke Wynants

Double Bass

Luzia Correia Rendeiro Vieira, Thomas Fiorini, Daniele Giampaolo, Simon Luce, John Van Lierop

Flute 

Wouter Van den Eynde (1), Sarah Miller

Clarinet

Midori Mori (2), Michelle Geerlings

Bassoon

Marceau Lefèvre (1), Jonas Coomans (2)

Horn

Mieke Ailliet (2), Luc van den Hove

Percussion

Gert D'haese (2), Titus Franken (2)

(1) principal

(2) soloist