The future of classical music after Covid-19? Multimedia concert invites us to look beyond the world’s current troubles
- Swedish clarinettist and conductor Martin Fröst’s Xodus (The Way Out Lies Within) is a multimedia concert that blends words, music and live painting
- Fröst hopes the project will encourage conversations about how we move forward ‘as individuals, musicians and society’
Swedish clarinettist and conductor Martin Fröst is teaming up with the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra to seek a way out of troubled times.
His latest multimedia project, Xodus (The Way Out Lies Within), blends words, music and live-painted images.
“We often look back on our history in classical music and on what we have achieved,” Fröst tells the South China Morning Post. “With Xodus, we want to look forwards. We ask, where do we go now? What is the way out – as individuals, musicians and as a society?”
Sometimes you cannot be sure what would touch you. Is it the drawing? Or is it the music? Or is it something else …?
It is his most difficult project yet, the musician says, “because it’s impossible to give the answer – I cannot say ‘OK, let’s find a way out’. But we can talk about it. We can talk about it with music, with words.”
Although Fröst came up with Xodus before the pandemic, he is glad that the concert’s theme is so relevant to today’s problems. “We have so many things that makes the human life very unstable and sad,” he says.
Film a new way to appreciate music, Hong Kong Sinfonietta discovers
Fröst says luring audiences back to concert halls post-Covid-19 has not been easy, and he questions the idea of “returning to normalcy” in the classical music world.
Instead, he argues, we should be a part of what he calls a “good change”.
“That’s my biggest wish as an artist, as a musician. [Other than] playing the beautiful music that we already have and are a part of, we should try to make ourselves a part of the wind that blows in another direction,” he says.
Fröst is known for pushing musical boundaries and seeking new ways to challenge and reshape classical music. He has previously combined music, choreography and light design in three innovative projects that pushed the envelope of the genre.
In Dollhouse (2013), Fröst – conducting for the first time – behaved as though he were attached to strings like a marionette doll, with the orchestra reacting to his puppet-like moves.
In the nostalgia-evoking Retrotopia (2018), he and composer Jesper Nordin used a motion sensor to control a virtual orchestra.
While Retrotopia looks to the past to see where we come from, Xodus looks to the future and says that we have to move on.
The mixed-media concert will feature contrasting pieces of music and weave different genres together. There will be surprising transitions, from artistic nods to rock group Queen to folk music, religious hymns and pieces by composers Annamaria Kowalsky and Goran Fröst, and an entirely new version of Hillborg’s piece Hyper Exit.
Fröst refers to Xodus as one piece of music, “so if you listen to it, you will not exactly know when one piece will goes to the next. You will just recognise it after a while.”
He will collaborate with Swedish satirist and artist Jesper Waldersten, whose live artwork and texts – characterised by satire, darkness and humour – will provide a dramatic backdrop to the music.
“It’s basically a mixture between art forms [coming] together, and [ …] my wish or my thought is that sometimes you cannot be sure what would touch you,” Fröst says.
“Is it the drawing? Or is it the music? Or is it something else, the words, the lights? And it’s something beautiful.”
He adds: “The way out lies here, in the music and in the concert [hall]. Everything moves in a journey towards the end. So, when [the audience] go out, they have lots of thoughts [such as] what can we do with the world.”
Xodus (The Way Out Lies Within) will premiere on May 5 and 7 at Konserthuset Stockholm in Sweden and will be available to live-stream free of charge from May 22 (via Konserthuset Play).
