Overture Magazine - 2015-2016 Season March-April 2016 | Page 38

{ program notes
20th and 21st centuries and includes works
of Hindemith, Ligeti, Crumb, Penderecki
and others.
Dariusz Skoraczewski last appeared as
a soloist with the BSO in February 2015,
performing J.C. Bach’s Sinfonia Concertante, Nicholas McGegan, conductor.

About the concert:
The K ingdom of Silence

Victoria Borisova–Ollas
Born in Vladivostok, Russia, 1969;
now living in Stockholm, Sweden

In the spellbinding tone poem The Kingdom of Silence, BSO audiences will be meeting a vividly original creative voice whose
background incorporates two very different
cultures. Victoria Borisova-Ollas was born
in Vladivostok, Russia’s far-eastern Pacific
port, yet for the past two decades she has
lived and worked in Sweden. However, she
disavows any overt nationalistic tendencies
in her music, saying that it is “just a healthy
blend of everything.”
As a young child taking piano lessons,
Borisova-Ollas “realized quite soon that it
was more fun playing my own compositions than other people’s. At first, it took
ages for me to write down my music. Eight
bars of music could take as many days to
turn into notes.” Borisova-Ollas’ musical
production became much faster after she
began studying at the prestigious Central
Music School of Moscow, followed by that
city’s legendary Tchaikovsky Conservatory. As perestroika began opening up the
U.S.S.R., she moved on to London’s Royal
College of Music and Sweden’s Malmö
Academy of Music. In the 1990s, she
settled in Sweden permanently.
Borisova-Ollas’ music has a strong
descriptive and storytelling quality, though
— unlike Richard Strauss — she does not
set out detailed scenarios but leaves listeners
free to crea