WATCH: The Scottish Chamber Orchestra Digital Season Part Two: Andrea Tarrodi’s Serenade in Seven Colours
The Scottish Chamber Orchestra’s Digital Season concerts allow you to experience the thrill of the SCO in performance wherever you are in the world. For their 2024/25 season, the orchestra have recorded three specially commissioned films, capturing intimate concerts in Edinburgh’s historic Leith Theatre.
In this second performance, the SCO tackle contemporary Swedish composer Andrea Tarrodi’s Serenade in Seven Colours.
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Hide AdBorn in 1981, Tarrodi started playing the piano at the age of 8. She studied composition at the Royal College of Music in Stockholm, Conservatorio di Musica di Perugia, Italy, and the College of Music in Piteå. She completed a master's degree in composition at the Royal College of Music in Stockholm, where she now lives, in 2009.
Her works have been performed in major concert halls all around the world including the Royal Albert Hall in London, the Berliner Philharmonie and the Wiener Musikverein. In 2018 Tarrodi's CD String Quartets, performed by the Dahlkvist Quartet, was awarded with a Swedish Grammy for best classical album of the year.
Tarrodi has synaesthesia – the condition through which the brain “hears” musical sounds as colours – so when she composes, colours determine the notes on the page. In this respect, she is in good company. Scriabin, Sibelius, Messiaen and Ligeti all experienced the same sensory phenomenon.
“It feels like a sort of sixth sense,”Tarrodi explained in a recent interview in The Scotsman. “I particularly like music that goes in purple and yellow, sometimes in gold.”
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Hide AdIn her Serenade in Seven Colours, Tarrodi draws on some of her favourite aural hues, aiming to transport the listener from purples to reds to yellows. Also listen out for echoes of both Mozart and Miles Davis.
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