On 15 April this year (2023), RTV Slovenia published an interview with composer Nina Šenk. One message really stuck in my mind and it is the following one: there is a democratisation and the loosening of hierarchies going on in music sphere. So the trend towards empowerment and inclusion of a wider range of members from the business and organisational world is coming into this circle as well. This transcript is copied directly from the RTV Slo article (by author Primož Trdan) … and of course translated for you who are part of international audience:
The concerto for orchestra is a genre made possible by the new technical and virtuosic level of orchestras at that time. It therefore remains an attractive musical terrain on which composers can exercise their bold ideas about the use of the whole orchestra. Nina Šenk’s music also often resorts to virtuosic means, and in her Concerto for Orchestra she has directed this towards the “democratisation” of orchestral membership and the loosening of strict hierarchies: “I don’t always give solos to the first violin or to the solo viola, but everybody in turn has short solos, including the twelfth violin, the seventh viola, the seventh cello. I play with this individualism in the orchestra. I don’t just go by the set hierarchy that we know and like to include those musicians who are more in the background in the standard works. On the other hand, I have still kept to the original idea of a concerto genre for orchestra in which the groups are virtuosically represented. But the emphasis is on the overall virtuosity of each instrumentalist, from beginning to end. They have a lot of notes, difficult passages, and they have to be extremely focused from beginning to end.”
Paradim 