Klas Torstensson about his ‘City Imprints’

After having been preoccupied with the ‘Far North’ for so many years – resulting in works like Barstend IJs (Cracking Ice, mixed media 1986), The Last Diary (reciting voice and ensemble, 1994) and The Expedition (opera, 1999) – I estimated that A Cycle of the North (2007-2012) for large orchestra would be the capstone of my passion for the region where I was born and raised. The Cycle of the North, consisting of Fastlandet (The Mainland), Polarhavet (The Polar Sea), and Himmelen (The Heaven), had been commissioned by a number of orchestras and venues in Sweden, Norway and The Netherlands. 

But… when the request for an orchestra piece reached me some years later, I returned to the subject of my youth. The blood creeps where it cannot run…

City Imprints, which might be considered a fourth, autonumous, part of A Cycle of the North, was written for the 400-year anniversary of the city of Gothenburg, Sweden, in 2021.  Due to the corona restrictions, the festivities however – including the first performance of City Imprints – had to be postponed, and are now scheduled for 14 & 15 December 2023 in Gothenburg.

I’m very happy that Kees Vlaardingerbroek of the ZaterdagMatinee in an early stage showed a strong interest in also performing the work in his series in the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam. The Radio Filharmonic Orchestra has over the past years performed several of my compositions and is therefore particularly qualified to play my music. This time the conductor is Ingo Metzmacher.

City Imprints deals with the history of Gothenburg, as well as with – to some extent – my own personal history with the city.

For me Gothenburg is a ‘city of farewells’. The emigrants of the eighteenth century – leaving for the Promised Land of America – took off from the harbor of Gothenburg, being the largest port of Sweden. So did also the misfortunate North Pole expedition of Salomon August Andrée in 1897, the subject of my opera The Expedition. (And so did I, myself – all further comparisons aside! – when in September 1973 I embarked the train for The Netherlands to study at the Institute of Sonology in Utrecht.)

Although not intended to be a programmatic piece of music, in City Imprints we can hear reminiscences of the soundscape, so characteristic for the historic city of Gothenburg and the region: the ships’ bells; the tireless sounds of stonecutters in the many stonemasonries in the neighborhood; the manoevres of the horse carriages in the sharp turns of the streets… For all these sounds, although originating from non-musical phenomena, I have looked for ways to make them deployable in a musical context, to musicalize them, as it were. How this is done, you will soon experience. 

The majority of the initial inhabitants of Gothenburg in the first decades were immigrants, above all from the Dutch Republic.  Dutch builders were contracted to plan the new city and construct its fortifications, because of their expertise in building on marshland. In order to drain the swampy ground and provide access for shipping, Gothenburg was given a network of canals, akin to those of Dutch cities like Amsterdam. The Dutch influence over Gothenburg in its early decades was so strong that it was sometimes regarded as a Dutch colony on Swedish soil. The language spoken in Gothenburg was mainly Dutch.

Klas Torstensson