Having my work performed at the Proms is incredibly special. I went to the Royal College of Music for my Master’s, so the Royal Albert Hall was always just across the street. I have also attended a number of proms, and even went and saw some dress rehearsals of new pieces – this was incredibly exciting. I never imagined I would have a piece in the festival so soon after!
Lara Poe, composer and King’s PhD student
05 August 2024
New song cycle by King's PhD student Lara Poe to premiere at the BBC Proms
The world premiere of the BBC-commissioned song cycle by King’s PhD Student Lara Poe will take place in the Royal Albert Hall this August.
On 25 August, Laulut Maaseudulta (Songs from the Countryside) by Lara Poe, Finnish-American composer and King’s PhD student, will premiere in the Royal Albert Hall as part of the BBC Proms, the world’s greatest classical music festival.
Songs from the Countryside will be brought to life by Anu Komsi (soprano) and Sakari Oramo conducting the Royal College of Music and the Sibelius Academy symphony orchestras. The song cycle is commissioned by BBC Radio 3.
Lara Poe joined King’s in 2020 to study for a PhD in Composition under the supervision of Professor Sir George Benjamin. Lara’s works have been performed in multiple venues around the world by the London Symphony Orchestra, Lahti Symphony Orchestra, Oulu Symphony Orchestra and Helsinki Chamber Choir among others.
Lara Poe has been a wonderful student, and I am so happy that soprano Anu Komsi and conductor Sakari Oramo have taken up her cause and will perform her new song-cycle at the BBC Proms. I hugely look forward to hearing the performance, and hope it will be a great success.
Professor Sir George Benjamin
Lara Poe started working on Laulut Maaseudulta in the autumn of 2023, but most of the creative process happened in the spring of 2024. The song cycle is based on her family’s history. It reflects her grandmother's upbringing on a farm in Kauklahti, Espoo, Finland in the 1930s-1940s – and how it was affected by the Second World War.
‘My grandmother Tidi reminisces a lot about her childhood on this farm. I recorded and transcribed my conversations with her, picked a few stories and started transforming them into song texts. Several of the songs talk about the cows and horses she had on the farm and explore our relationship with animals. Some tell stories of Finnish people who passed the farm on their way from Karelia as they were escaping the war.’
Kauklahti as it was now lives in Lara’s and her grandmother’s memory; with time, it has transformed and was eventually absorbed by the expanding Finnish capital. ‘It is now a suburb of Helsinki, and it looks very different’, Lara clarifies.
Her grandmother Tidi will experience the composition based on her childhood memories a week after it premieres in the Royal Albert Hall. She will be in the audience during the second performance of Laulut Maaseudulta – and the first ever in Finland – at the Helsinki Festival on 1 September 2024. ‘I am incredibly fortunate,’ Lara says, ‘to have secured these two performances and I hope that Songs from the Countryside will sound in other places in the world.’
Find out more about the Prom performance on the BBC website.
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Henry Purcell Professor of Composition