The Summer Festival’s Picnic Concert No. 4 will take place at 7:30 p.m. Friday, July 28, in Hahn Hall at Miraflores, 1070 Fairway Road. The astonishing program includes:

Three movements from Anna Thorvaldsdóttir‘s “Sola for Solo Viola and Electronics” (2019), with Nicolas Valencia, viola; Russell Wharton’s “Deus Ex Metronome for Solo Snare Drum and Audio,” (2018), with Dana Dominguez, snare drum; Kaija Saariaho’s “‘Fall for Harp and Electronics,” (1991) with Kaitlin Miller, harp; Libby Larsen‘s “Try Me, Good King: Last Words of the Wives of Henry VIII” (2000),” Kylie Kreucher, soprano, and Sujin Choi, piano; Samuel Barber “Dover Beach, Opus 3” (1931), with Harin Kang and Aaron You-Xin Li, violins, Vincenzo Keawe Calcagno, viola, Hamzah Zaidi, cello, and Alex Granito, baritone; and Kees Olthuis’ “Introduction and Allegro” (2006), with Kahlan Yenney, bassoon, Samuel Watson, contrabassoon, Ariana O’Connell and Oliver Leitner, violins, Kenneth Fujii, viola, Hamzah Zaidi, cello, and Chingju Chloe Yu, double bass.

This program is what we used to call consciousness expanding. Having listened to every piece on it, I have to say, my consciousness, at any rate, has been expanded in several directions — all of them worth the journey.

Before I looked her up, I was prepared, by the spelling of her name, to find that Anna Thorvaldsdóttir was Icelandic. Her name means “Thorvald’s daughter.”

In Icelandic, “daughter” is “dóttir,” as distinguished from Danish and Norwegian, where it is spelled “datter,” or Swedish, where it is “dotter.”

In Finnish — Finland being a lot closer to Sweden, Norway and Denmark than Iceland, you might expect a different vowel or two, but the same consonants — “daughter” is spelled “tytär,” reflecting, perhaps, Finland’s considerable Lap population, and her uncomfortable proximity to Russia.

Pronounce “tytär,” however, and you wind up with something sounding a lot like “dytter.”

We are all familiar with the universal suffix “-son,” meaning “so and so’s son.” Unlike “daughter,” “son,” denoting male offspring, is spelled the same in just about all the Anglo-Nordic languages (German “Sohn”; Dutch “zoon”).

But only in Scandinavia, so far as I know, do we find the charming practice of a woman’s name identifying her as the patriarch’s daughter. It is, I suppose, some kind of indicator of the strong position of women in Scandinavian society.

(With my usual creepy synchronicity, I find myself contemplating this program as I read the 1931 novel “The Wild Orchid” by Norway’s Nobel-winning Sigrid Undset, whose most famous work is the trilogy of medieval Norway, “Kristin Lavrinsdatter.”)

Anna Thorvaldsdóttir’s music, anyway, packs an incredible amount of tension and potential energy into each bar. It sounds to me like music for an impending storm. (This is just one listener’s reaction, not an analysis.) It is hard to resist, for all that. I get sucked right in.

Thunderous kudos to the Music Academy for programming so much American music this Festival, much of it by living composers. If you aren’t up to speed on contemporary classical music by the end of the summer, you haven’t been paying attention.

American Russell Wharton‘s mesmerizing piece for snare drum and audio “Deus Ex Metronome” could easily have turned monotonous and repetitious, but, by continuously reinventing itself, it keeps us listening and guessing until the end.

In 2019 the BBC Music Magazine polled 174 of the best contemporary composers (Anna Thorvaldsdóttir among them), trying to generate a list of the 50 greatest composers of all time.

Bach was No. 1, of course, but Finland’s Kaija Saariaho was No. 17, and, 1-16 being dead, Saariaho was hailed as the greatest living composer. Her reign was short, alas, for she died, in Paris, on 2 June, a couple of weeks before the start of this year’s Festival.

In addition to her vote, Anna Thorvaldsdóttir made the following statement to the magazine’s editors: “Kaija Saariaho is one of the monumental composers of our time. There are so many wonderful things that can be said about her music, especially her great pieces for larger forces — many of which are personal favorites.

“In addition I feel that the powerful presence of her music over the years has been particularly important as a role model for younger generations, not least for younger women in music that find inspiration and encouragement in such a compelling composer. This multifaceted influence will, without doubt, carry on shape the music of the future.”
 
“[Saariaho’s] characteristically rich, polyphonic textures,” avers Wikipedia,  “are often created by combining live music and electronics.” I won’t try to expand on this, except to say that from the first notes of the pieces I have heard, I knew I was dealing with a composer of tremendous assurance and undeniable significance.”

Considering that it treats, however tangentially, with the detestable royal serial killer (a poster child for the truism that “there is no such thing as bad publicity”), I approached Libby Larsen’s “Try Me, Good King: Last Words of the Wives of Henry VIII” with dire hesitation.

But Larsen, with her great skill and tact keeps these laments — painful, implicitly feminist — well within the range of the bearable, and even permits the occasional drawing of a pleasurable breath.

Throughout his life, Samuel Barber set many literary texts — from Euripides, Shakespeare, and James Joyce, to John Greenleaf Whittier and John Addington Symonds — but two stand out and are still regularly performed today. “Dover Beach” is the earlier; and “Knoxville: Summer of 1915, Opus 24” (1947), a unique masterpiece, the later.

“Dover Beach,” the 1867 poem by Matthew Arnold on which the Barber song is based, has an uncannily modern feel to it. A man and woman — perhaps lovers, perhaps a married couple — are staying, possibly hiding, in a hotel on the English coast, within sight of the famous White Cliffs.

The man looks out the window at the moonlit landscape and reflects upon the ebb and flow of human history.

His reflections are wise and profound, but the setting itself reminds me of the first scene of Noël Coward‘s greatest play” Private Lives” (1930), except Coward’s hotel is located on the French coast, and looks across the Channel from the opposite direction. (A kind of moonlight scene inspired the play: Coward was holed up in the Peninsula Hotel in Shanghai with a fever of 103°.

As he gazed out on the moonlit terrace of his room, he hallucinated Gertrude Lawrence wearing a Molyneux gown stepping out into a moonbeam and refusing to leave until he had started writing “Private Lives.”)
 
As with his setting of James Agee in “Knoxville,” Barber’s music carries Arnold’s text without ever overwhelming it. “The sea is calm tonight … “

Listening to Kees Olthuis’s amazing “Introduction and Allegro,” I kept asking myself why it took me until now to become aware of this magisterial Dutch composer. But, then, I asked myself roughly the same question for every composer on this marvelous program, except Samuel Barber.

Tickets to Picnic Concerts start at $40 (7-17 admitted free; $10 Community Access tickets as available) and can be purchased in person from the Summer Festival Ticket Office, Carsey Ticket Office, 10 a.m.-5 p.m. weekdays until Aug. 4; by phone, 805-969-8787; or online at www.musicacademy.org.