Nous sommes en 1798 une époque sombre et instable de notre histoire. Voleurs et bandits rôdent dans le pays faisant des ravages partout où ils passent échappant souvent à la loi. Mais ce n?est pas le cas lorsqu?ils attaquent le village allemand de Daaden et qu?une vingtaine d?escrocs allemands français et hollandais recherchés depuis longtemps est enfin neutralisée... La Tour Blanche d?Otto M. Schwarz nous invite à prendre part à la planification et la mise en oeuvre de la bataille.

Composer's Program Note Repertoire operas occationally have orchestral suites: Bits and pieces of overture interlude etc. tied upin a bouquet of 'schönste Tränen'. Contemporary opera usually wither after the first season so the focusis on getting people to come and have a sniff before it's too late. Consequently it seemed obvious to meto start making orchestral excerpts from my operas that are meant to be played before the premiere (andafter please); I call them 'opera trailers' when they're substantial enough to be considered independent works and 'opera demos' when they're relatively short and moreappetizer-ish. SNOW WHITE'S MIRROR is a full scale two act dramatic opera written for the Danish National Opera. The opera is a modern re-telling for grown-ups of the brothers Grimm's fairy tale: Snow White is a self-centered teenage narcissist and the villain of the opera; she ends up loosing everyone but herself either because she kills them or because they decide they can't stand being around her anymore. But apparently she's o.k. with that...The music is intended for a large audience: it's basically pop music done with all the craftmanship of aclassical composer who's equally at home with large scale symphonic form avantgarde technique opera singing - and modern pop. The Trailer is in three movements. It contains three sections of the opera; the prelude an interlude close to the beginning of the second act and the final scene but one. It's a gloomy sort of trailer starting out in grand title sequence style moving on to a decidedly odd piece where Snow White find her way to the dwarfs (who're creepy junkies doing pornography to get money to buy dope) and ending in kind of an eerie rejection mood: Everyone still alive walks out on Snow White singing 'skin as white as snow hands red with blood soul as black as ivory'.(NM 2010)

Picnic At Hanging Rock (Utflykt til det okända) for Orchestra by Britta Byström (2010). Programme Note ”What we see and what we seem are but a dream a dream within a dream” – These words opens Peter Wier’s film on Joan Lindsay’s novel Picnic at Hanging Rock from 1967. The story takes place on Valentines Day 1900. A group of school girls go on a picnic at Hanging Rock in Australia and get caught up in a volcanic eruption. Three of the girls disappear without a trace – as if they where swallowed up by the mountain.  Inspiredby Peter Weir’s poetic and many layered film I have composed a tone poem – with the emphasis on poem – or poetry – as opposed to programme music. Disappearance is an important motif. The piece is a series of disappearances and transformations – one after another. At the end you can hear how the sound of the orchestra disappears in a swarm of clanging triangles – a way of picturing the girls disappearing into the mountain.  I have tried to catch several other of the characteristics of the film: The school girls in their white dresses the dangerous yet alluring mountain where the watches mysteriously stop at 12 the spell that makes the girls climb higher and higher and – at the end – the unanswered hesitant question: what really did happen?  Britta Byström