In the concert led by Tapiola Sinfonietta’s Artistic Partner Nicolas Altstaedt, the cello sings the calm of a Bohemian forest, Killmayer’s music flashes images of youth, and Dvořák’s symphony stirs the world.
Nicolas Altstaedt leader
Wilhelm Killmayer: Sostenuto for cello and strings
Antonín Dvořák: “Silent Woods” for cello and orchestra
Wilhelm Killmayer: Jugendzeit
Intermission
Antonín Dvořák: Symphony No. 7 in D-minor, Op. 70
In spring 2026, Nicolas Altstaedt introduced the Espoo audience to the Munich-based composer Wilhelm Killmayer (1927–2017), who makes a return in this concert with the short Sostenuto for cello and strings and the symphonic poem Jugendzeit. Composed when Killmayer was fifty, “Youth” appears as a nostalgic series of images, marked by breathtaking beauty and a sense of tentative hesitation. The cello was also a solo instrument dear to Dvořák, which in Silent Woods sings of the peace of the Bohemian forest. Dvořák said that his Seventh Symphony was meant to “stir the world.” To his German publisher, who was lukewarm toward the dramatic symphony, he added: “Let us hope that nations which possess art and cultivate it will never perish, however small they may be.”
