Nordland Music Festival 2024
31st July - 4th August 2024

On 31st July, COE Leader/Director Lorenza Borrani, strings and clarinets take flight to Northern Norway where they join mezzo-soprano Marianne Beate Kielland for the opening concert of the Nordland Music Festival at the Stormen Concert Hall in Bodø on 3rd August. This concert takes the COE further north than ever before and it has been many months in the making; a celebration of Bodø being one of the European Capitals of Culture for 2024. They will perform songs by Grieg, Schubert and Mahler as well as Mendelssohn’s Konzertstück No. 2 and Beethoven’s String Quartet No. 11 (arranged for string orchestra by Gustav Mahler). This is the Orchestra’s second time in Norway, following concerts with Vilde Frang and Rafael Payare in Oslo and Bergen in 2022.

The first ever European Capital of Culture within the Arctic circle, Bodø is in Nordland, a region which stretches 800 km from north to south and where the midnight sun shines for weeks on end. Opened just under 10 years ago in November 2014, the Stormen Concert Hall is part of the development of a cultural quarter on Bodø’s waterfront. The project includes a concert hall and a library, both designed by London-based architects DRDH who were awarded the project in 2009 through an international competition. Working with Arup Acoustics, DRDH created a concert hall that has one of the best acoustics in Europe and which is home to the Arctic Sinfonietta which, when it joins forces with Tromsø’s Arctic Chamber Orchestra, forms the Arctic Philharmonic Orchestra.

Linda Netland, the Nordland Music Festival Director, said: “We are excited to welcome the Chamber Orchestra of Europe to Bodø. The dialogue between Nordland Musikkfestuke (Nordland Music Festival) and the orchestra began last spring and resulted in an excellent program after a fruitful collaboration. We believe the program put together for the opening of Nordland Music Festival provides a beautiful start to a week packed with concerts and events. Marianne Beate Kielland is an excellent choice as soloist; she has a strong connection to our region, and we eagerly anticipate her performance with the Chamber Orchestra of Europe. The repertoire is also fitting, given that Bodø is the European Capital of Culture – featuring classical and romantic pieces from some of our finest composers, all performed by one of Europe’s foremost chamber orchestras.”

Lorenza Borrani has been Leader/Director of the Chamber Orchestra of Europe since 2008. Her work with Nikolaus Harnoncourt and Lorenzo Coppola inspired her love and knowledge of period performance practice. Her encounters with Lorin Maazel and Symphonica Toscanini, Claudio Abbado and Orchestra Mozart, where she also performed as a soloist, shaped her musical ideas and interests. As a soloist, she has collaborated with Trevor Pinnock, Yannick Nézet-Séguin and Bernard Haitink.

As a chamber musician, Lorenza has collaborated with artists such as Kristian Bezuidenhout, András Schiff, Pierre-Laurent Aimard, Janine Jansen and Daniel Hope, and she often plays in a duo with Alexander Lonquich. Lorenza is one of the founders of Spunicunifait which is dedicated to playing and recording Mozart’s string quintets works. The group is currently recording for the Alpha label and performances are scheduled at Bremen Festspiele and London’s Wigmore Hall.

Lorenza is one of the co-founders of Spira mirabilis, a laboratory for the preparation and performance of orchestral and chamber music repertoire of all periods, which works without a conductor or a leader. Their projects have included full opera of Nozze di Figaro, Beethoven’s Symphony No.9, fragments from Mozart’s Così fan tutte and the premiere of Colin Matthew’s Spiralling, in Aldeburgh.

Lorenza studied with Alina Company, Piero Farulli, Zinaida Gilels and Pavel Vernikov at the Scuola di Musica di Fiesole, and took the postgraduate course at the Kunstuniversität Graz with Boris Kuschnir. She is a Professor of Violin at the Scuola di Musica di Fiesole and has been a visiting professor at the Royal Academy of Music in London since 2019.

The Leader/Director Chair is supported by Ms Dasha Shenkman.

Listen to Lorenza on Interlude, the COE’s podcast.

“A singer with such a charisma challenged her colleagues.” (DrehPunkt-Kultur) Mezzo-soprano Marianne Beate Kielland is famous for her strong stage presence and musical integrity. Gramophone Magazine writes about her: “The mezzo-soprano is quite outstanding: strong, firm, sensitive in modulations, imaginative in her treatment of words, with a voice pure in quality, wide in range and unfalteringly true in intonation.”

She was educated at the Norwegian Academy of Music, where she studied with Svein Bjørkøy. She has also studied with Oren Brown and Barbara Bonney.

She is one of Europe’s foremost concert singers, and she regularly appears in the concert halls of Europe, Japan and America with conductors such as: Masaaki Suzuki, Andrew Manze, Michel Corboz, Leonardo Alarcon, Herbert Blomstedt, Christopher Moulds, Jordi Savall, Rinaldo Alessandrini, Rene Jacobs, Pablo Heras-Casado, Han-Na Chang, Juanjo Mena and Ottavio Dantone.

​In 2012 she was US Grammy nominee in “Best Vocal Classical Album» for “Veslemøy Synsk” by Olav Anton Thommessen, and with this and more than 60 other recordings and a wide range of repertoire and performances, she is established as a remarkable interpreter of music from baroque to contemporary era. She is the artistic leader of Oslo Chamber Music Festival and part-time associate professor at Norwegian Academy of Music.

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