Two Northern Times. Aud the Deep Minded and HAV Duo
15 April 2026, 19:00 - Ģertrūde Street Theatre
(101a Ģertrūdes iela, Riga)
PROGRAMME:
I
Joanna NICHOLSON (1965) Chamber opera Aud the Deep Minded
Clíona Cassidy, soprano
Joanna Nicholson, clarinet
Andy Saunders, horn
Alistair MacDonald, electronics
Kirsty Anderson, projections
II
Ernests Valts CIRCENIS (2000)
couler [world premiere!]
Sunleif RASMUSSEN (1961)
Bird Metamorphoses [2022]
Lil LACY (1985)
Havgus [2022]
HΛV Duo:
Marianne Sihvonen, flute
Alvi Joensen, guitar
"We Live in Different Times" resonates with particular vividness in the Baltics: we are simultaneously bearers of both Europe's centripetal and peripheral experience, living between memory and an accelerated present, between local linguistic spaces and international circulation. This evening at Ģertrūdes Street Theatre is deliberately conceived as a two-part event with an interval — offering two distinct modes of listening in a single evening. It also places "Baltic Music Days" on a broader Northern map: this year the festival takes place in close collaboration with Nordic composer organisations, and so alongside Baltic composers' music, the concerts also feature Nordic works and musicians from the North, reaching their greatest intensity in precisely this concert.
I
Aud the Deep Minded is a one-act psychological drama that weaves fragments of 9th-century Scottish Viking sagas into a contemporary story of power, faith, and choice. The journey of the Viking woman Aud — from loss and the impulse for revenge to the realisation that she herself has become an oppressor, and the decision to liberate the enslaved — resonates with the Baltic experience: here, history is not abstract; it is a question of responsibility and action in the present. The work's multilingualism (layers of English, Latin, Norwegian, and Gaelic) and its live electronics reveal identity as a movement in constant translation — just as Baltic culture often lives in several languages and memories simultaneously.
In a different time and on a different scale, HΛV Duo also takes the stage — Finnish-Sámi flautist Marianne Sihvonen and Faroese guitarist Alvi Joensen. They bring a Nordic perspective to the festival not only through repertoire but also through their presence on stage: new creation, close collaboration with composers, and music that thinks about humankind's relationship with the environment over the long term. This evening, the different times of the Baltics and the North meet in a single space — and the interval becomes a threshold that allows the listener to experience this transition clearly and consciously.
AUD THE DEEP MINDED is a psychological drama that weaves fragments of 9th-century Scottish Viking sagas into a contemporary story of power, faith, and choice. Drawing inspiration from fragmentary and not always reliably documented shards of history and reinterpreting them through a contemporary lens, this one-act opera traces Aud's transformative journey from the oppressed, to the oppressor, and then to the liberator.Aud the Deep Minded was indeed a real person; her name appears in the Icelandic sagas (and also in the television drama Vikings). It is fairly well established that she was the daughter of the Norwegian Ketill Flatnose. This influential man once ruled, on behalf of King Harald Fairhair, territories now known as the Orkney and western Scottish islands. It is also known that having lost her husband, King Olaf, and her son, Red Thorstein, in a brutal massacre, Aud secretly commissioned the building of a ship in the forests of Caithness in northwest Scotland. In it, she set sail for Iceland, then still unsettled territory, taking with her family members and several enslaved people. Upon settling in the new land, she granted these slaves their freedom and plots of land to farm, and established a thriving community in which she lived to a natural death at a great age. It is also notable that Aud was a Christian at a time when the majority of Vikings still worshipped pagan gods. Aud's true life story has become shrouded in mist over the centuries — shaped by various tales, embellishments, legends, and facts either forgotten or deliberately suppressed. This opera was born from imagining Aud the Deep Minded as a reincarnated supernatural being who exists across the ages. The work celebrated its premiere in October 2024 at the Aberdeen Sound Festival and was subsequently performed at numerous other venues across Scotland.
Text by Santa Bušs, translation by Krists Auznieks