Summer of the Sea

Annika Sandberg is a rising star of both Lieder and opera and this is her album debut. In 2024 she won the Mozart Prize of the Wilhelm Stenhammar International Music competition and in 2023, First Prize in the Grosser Liedpreis von HIDALGO in Munich. She made her international operatic debut in 2019. Sandberg studied at University College of Opera Stockholm and at the Mozarteum University, Salzburg.

Chiara Schmidt was admitted to the class of Anna Abbate at the Conservatorio Giuseppe Verdi at the age of ten. She graduated from the University of Vienna in 2019and the Mozarteum, Salzburg, in 2022. Among her many awards, she has won First Prize in the International Piano Competition ‘Città di Guastalla’ (2011), the National PianoCompetition ‘Riviera Etrusca’ (2016) and the International Piano Competition ‘Rovered’Oro’ (2017).

The title for the album is taken from Ture Rangström’s suite, Havets sommar, ten short songs with his own lyrics written between 1911 and 1915, and which follows the course of a summer day on the water from sunrise to nighttime.

The songs capture the beauty of light, waves and landscape, but they do not shy away from their hardness or fierceness. The songs’ tone is often one of awe, but with an ever-present edge of the uncanny. Sadly, the song cycle is rarely performed today. This is not, however the case with Gösta Nystroem’s Själ och landskap – Nya sånger vid havet (Soul and Landscape – New Songs by the Sea), with lyrics by the Swedish poet Ebba Lindqvist. Where Rangström’s sea is a source of necessary life and vigour, Lindqvist’s is a secret lover, a comfort in loneliness, and a calm refuge.