Brad S. Ross
New York City audiences were treated to another lovely program of Scandinavian music as the New York Scandia Symphony’s chamber orchestra returned for the 2026 Scandinavian Music Festival on Saturday, June 13 at the Christ & Saint Stephen’s Episcopal Church on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. The ensemble, which consisted of mainly strings and a smattering of other instruments, was deftly lead by music director Dorrit Matson, who established the Scandia Symphony in 1988. The concert opened with a charming performance of Johan Helmich Roman’s Flute Concerto in G-major. Mirroring last season’s performance of his Violin Concerto in D minor, it seems fitting that a program of Scandinavian music should begin with the “father of Swedish music” himself. Roman, despite his vaunted status in Sweden, globally often lives in the shadow of contemporaries like Johann Sebastian Bach and George Frideric Handel, making any performance of his music a rare treat. The piece itself is short and sweet—lasting no more than 15 minutes—with the solo elegantly played by the flautist and frequent Scandia collaborator Lisa Hansen. It is cast in traditional concerto form, opening on a stately “Non troppo Allegro” followed by a melancholic “Larghetto” and a jubilant “Allegro” finale. The final movement was the most substantial of the three, providing some nice solo moments for Hansen as well as a few soli passages for others in the ensemble. The program then shifted forward two centuries—in composition date, at least—as the Swedish composer Lars-Erik Larsson’s Gustaviansk Svit (Gustavian Suite) followed. Larsson was a prominent figure in the 20th-century Swedish orchestral world, having written numerous concert pieces in addition to myriad programmatic works for theater, radio, and film. His Gustaviansk Svit is adapted from his score to the 1944 Swedish period drama film Kungajakt (The Royal Hunt); as the film is set in the 1780s, Larsson composed it in a decidedly neo-Baroque/neo-Classical fashion, replete with harpsichord and at times aggressively functional harmony. The suite contains about 15 minutes of music divided into five short movements: a somber “Entrada,” a waltz-like “Pastorale,” an upbeat “Andante grazioso” with some cute pizzicato passages, a wholesome “Arietta” (perhaps my favorite movement), and a satisfying “Festivo” finale. Much as I enjoyed it in parts, however, the whole did feel a tad quaint by 20th-century standards and part of me longed for the prochronisms common in other film music of the era. The program then propelled forward another seventy years with the German composer and Scandia principal violist Frank Foerster's delightful The Eagles of Inwood Hill, which was first performed by the Scandia Symphony in October 2015. Its backstory, which Foerster charmingly over-explained before the performance, stems from the three American Bald Eagles chicks that were reintroduced to northern Manhattan from Wisconsin back in 2006. Foerster, who resides in Inwood, frequently observed their maturation on the Inwood Hill Nature Center’s “eaglecam,” which ultimately served as inspiration for this piece. The Eagles of Inwood Hill is divided into three sections. The first titled “The Spirit of the Air” comprised a series of energetic dances that reminded me at times of Antonín Dvorák’s later string quartets or even “The Sailor’s Hornpipe”; these dances were occasionally broken by the sounds of young eagles screeching (the high strings of a violin) or a chromatic descending scale as the fledgling eagles awkwardly learned to fly. The second section titled “Notturno-Lullaby” resembles a mellow berceuse with a bittersweet 3/4 melody lightly colored by twinkling percussion. The last segment “Into the Sky” began with six bells to herald the arrival of morning before awakening into a heroic, almost cinematic, conclusion; Foerster quotes the traditional tune “Over the Hills and Far Away” here, but I also heard shades of “America the Beautiful”—an apt inclusion for music inspired by America’s national bird. The final piece of the evening was an exhilarating performance All We Know Is That It Radiates by the Danish cellist and composer Josefine Opsahl. Another Scandia Symphony commission, it was first performed a mere three blocks away at the Good Shepherd-Faith Presbyterian Church last June. Having attended both performances, I’m happy to report that it’s every bit as radiant on second hearing. Opsahl, who attended dressed in sparkling sneakers and a pink jacket with matching shorts, briefly spoke about the ungraspable phenomena of the world and the supreme arrogance of human behavior that served as the work’s inspiration; I’m less excited to say that this theme seems even more timely now than it did in the summer of 2025. The composition is richly textured with layered tremolo lines and shifting ostinati from which a haunting melody occasionally surfaces before disappearing back into a sea of color. In my previous review, I’d written that it reminded me of Ralph Vaughan Williams’s Tallis Fantasia or the works of Anna Thorvaldsdottir. While I still heard glimmers of Tallis (arguably unavoidable when writing for string orchestra), this time the Thorvaldsdottir comparison seemed less apparent. Opsahl’s music is densely textural, yes, but also deeply melodic in ways that mirror some post-minimalists, yet sound entirely her own. This is a piece that will demand repeated listenings. Fortunately, Matson and Opsahl announced that a premiere recording of All We Know Is That It Radiates is currently in the works, meaning those repeat hearings will happily come sooner than later. For those interested, the Scandia Symphony also has an album of Lars-Erik Larsson’s orchestral works available from multiple platforms online, including the Gustaviansk Svit. These morsels will hopefully be enough to sate the appetite until the next performance by this remarkable ensemble—a real gem of the New York classical music scene.
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