Bergmania Ensemble & Matti Hyökki Bergmaniana

As a whole, the music of Bergman could perhaps be epitomised as the coexistence of two opposing strivings: “human” music with a purpose often founded on melodic material, and music of a ritual, mythical and seemingly timeless nature. This opposition offers one angle on the meaning of modernism in relation to Bergman: rather than being an objective observer of his material in the manner of the 1950s modernists, Bergman was more of a symbolist-expressionist modernist (in the sense and the tone of, say, the poetess Edith Södergran, a Swedish-speaking Finn and a contemporary of T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound) whose works always reflect on the empirical world of the individual in a reality that will fundamentally always remain a mystery.