Cadogan Fine Art and Fiumano Clase have their next exhibition ‘Distant Voices’ from Thursday 8th to Tuesday 13th May at Gallery 475, 475 Fulham Road, London, SW6 1HL.
The exhibition focuses on the work of contemporary Nordic artists and their meditations on nature, its strength and the importance of listening to its ‘voices’. There is a strong belief in the magic of nature in the north with its history of trolls, elves and ‘the hidden people’. https://cadoganfinearts.com/exhibitions/
Aquavit Masterclass and Tasting – Wednesday 4 June at 7pm
I am delighted to confirm details about this exciting event, which will be held in the Allen Room of St Anne’s Church, Soho (55 Dean Street, London W1D 6AF).
The award-winning company Nuet Aquavit was founded by Norwegian Morten Pharo Halle and we are fortunate to have their brand ambassador, Jake Lovell-Hewitt, to give a presentation that will explore three classic Scandinavian aquavits followed by an introduction to three Nuet products (including Nuet Cøffee, not yet available in the UK).
A welcome drink and finger food will be provided from 7pm, with the talk and tasting starting at 7.30pm. There will then be an opportunity to mingle and to purchase Nuet products at a discount and the evening will finish at 9pm. To learn more about the company, see their website: About | Nuet – Scandinavian Dry Aquavit
Places are limited to 40 on a first-come, first-served basis. To confirm your attendance, please email the Anglo-Norse Society on AngloNorse2019@outlook.com and also make a payment of £20 per person to the Society’s account:
Sort Code: 09-01-29
Account: 39883755
Account name: The Anglo-Norse Society in London
Reference: NUET
The Spring Behind the Veil
A chamber music concert by Finnish viola-piano ensemble Duo Rhosia in collaboration with violinist Simon Hewitt Jones.
Experience the sound of renewal
Finnish ensemble Duo Rhosia brings a chamber music evening to London, blending the elegance of classical masterpieces with the soul of Nordic, British, and Eastern European music.
The program weaves together Mozart, Clarke, Sibelius, Shostakovich, Skoryk, and Beethoven-Bowen, creating a night of beauty, hope, and light.
Join musicians from Finland, the UK, and beyond for an evening of international collaboration.
The Café / Bar will be serving you before the concert.
Tickets: £20 + service fee in advance, or at door (cash only).
Links to ticket sale (Eventbrite)
The Spring Behind the Veil Tickets, Fri 11 Apr 2025 at 19:00 | Eventbrite
The Spring Behind the Veil Tickets, Sat 12 Apr 2025 at 19:00 | Eventbrite
Programme:
W.A. Mozart, Trio in Eb KV 498 “Kegekstatt”
Beethoven-Bowen, Obligato to Moonlight Sonata
M. Skoryk, Melody
D. Shostakovich, Five Pieces for 2 Violins and Piano
J. Sibelius, Rondo for Viola and Piano
R. Clarke, Morpheus for Viola and Piano
R. Clarke, “Dumka” Duo Concertante for Violin, Viola and Piano
Performers
Simon Hewitt Jones – Violin
Matti Lindholm – Viola
Alina Sorjonen – Piano
Concert Dates & Venues
Burgh House, New End Square, London NW3 1LT
Finnish Church, 33 Albion Street, London SE16 7HZ
Anglo-Danish Society Dinner
10th October 2025 at 7 p.m. to 11 p.m.
HM Tower of London, London EC3N 4AB
The Anglo-Danish Society have kindly invited members of other Nordic Societies to join them at a special dinner.
Members and their guests are invited to join this special event hosted by RHQ Princess of Wales’s Royal Regiment in the Fusilier Mess inside the historic Tower of London.
Diners and their guests will enjoy a pre-dinner drinks reception in the Fusilier Museum from 7pm, followed by a three-course dinner, including drinks, in the Officers’ Mess Dining Room and with suitable entertainment.
This event is held in a unique venue not open to the general public and is a firm favourite in our calendar. We feel very privileged to be allowed access to this venue.
Dress code: Black Tie with medals.
Tickets are £130 per person for members and £145 per person for non-members.
Please note that there is no car parking, disabled or wheelchair access available and taxis are not allowed entry inside the grounds.
Furthermore, the Tower of London is a non-smoking area.
Applications to be made by Thursday 25th September 2025. Please inform us of any dietary requirements
Please note that payments should be made by bank transfer to our account: Sort Code: 55-70-13, account number: 78325285. Please use the reference TOL101025 for your payment.
See also: Black Tie Dinner at HM Tower of London « Anglo-Danish Society
The United Kingdom Sibelius Society (‘UKSS’) is holding a concert at Burgh House, Hampstead, London at 2 p.m. on Sunday, 8 June 2025.
Jenny Stern, piano, and Emmanuel Bach, violin, will perform a wide selection of Sibelius’s music for piano and for violin and piano.
Here is the full music programme:
Sonatine for Violin and Piano, Op.80
Works for piano:
Impromptu, Op.97 No.5
Impromptu, Op.5 No.6
Rondoletto, Op.40 No.7
Valse, Op.24 No.5
Romance, Op.24 No.9
Lied, Op.97 No.2
Violin and piano:
Menuetto Op.81 No.5
Interval
Danses Champêtres, Op.106
1. Largamente assai
2. Alla polacca
3. Tempo moderato
4. Tempo di Menuetto
5. Moderato
Six Humoresques for Violin and Piano
I. Commodo, Op.87 No.1
II. Allegro assai, Op.87 No.2
III. Alla gavotta, Op.89 No.1
IV. Andantino, Op.89 No.2
V. Commodo, Op.89 No.3
VI. Allegro, Op.89 No.4
Tickets: We have arranged an allocation of 20 tickets at an early purchase price for A-FS members and the members of the other Anglo-Nordic Societies of £12 each provided you register and pay by 17 April. To book please email the Hon. Secretary at secretary@anglofinnishsociety.org.uk giving the name of the event, your name (and the names of any other members and guests (max. one per member) you wish to register) and make payment by bank transfer to The Anglo- Finnish Society account at Barclays (details of which are available from the Hon. Secretary by email). When paying, please give your surname followed by 0806 as the payment reference. After 17 April, you can obtain tickets directly from the UKSS at the full price of £15. Please note that bookings cannot be accepted without your payment.
Edition of 6 + 2 APs
Image 70 x 98 cm / 27.5 x 38.6 in
Framed 82 x 110 cm / 32.3 x 43.3 in
Santeri Tuori’s forthcoming solo exhibition at Purdy Hicks Gallery will present new works from his Forest and Sky series, together with two new groups of work, Black Trees, centred on London’s iconic plane trees and small-scale cloud studies, Cloud.
For the Forest series Tuori has spent much time on the remote island of Kökar in the Aland archipelago in southwestern Finland. He photographs repeatedly the same place, from the identical spot, at different seasons and times of day, sometimes years apart. Multiple images, both black and white and colour, are then superimposed. The series, like all his work, reveal his preoccupation with the passage of time.
Santeri Tuori’s Sky series focusses solely on the sky as a subject in its own right. Again, the artist layers black and white and colour photographs, giving some more prominence while others are only nebulously suggested, resulting in images that seems as if on the border of painting and photography, allowing the viewer total immersion in skyscapes of great depth and luminosity. In the new small-scale series, Cloud, Tuori has photographed a single cloud moving across the sky, taking numerous shots over a short period of time. The ephemeral nature of the moment shimmers in the work, the light fades into immateriality, slips into blackness, and flashes into its opposite. The Clouds are displayed individually in drifting clusters, creating the impression that the images are dissolving into the sky.
Building on his distinctive layering technique, Tuori’s series entitled Black Trees, created during his recent residency with the Backroom Foundation in London, are made with two identical images – one printed on photographic paper and the other on delicate translucent Japanese paper. The loosely attached layers create a depth and dimensionality, conjuring with their performative quality the true grandeur of London planes with their majestic trunks and gestural branches. Appreciated for their resilience to urban conditions and pollution, London planes are a celebrated part of the city’s landscape.
Santeri Tuori: Black Trees | 27 February – 29 March 2025 – Overview | Purdy Hicks Gallery
24th June 2025 (11:45 – 14:30)
Lincoln’s Inn, Lincoln’s Inn Fields WC2A 3TL
All four Nordic Societies in England – the Anglo-Danish Society, the Anglo-Finnish Society, the Anglo-Norse Society and the Anglo-Swedish Society – are renewing last year’s successful Nordic Midsummer lunch and invite you to Lincoln’s Inn on Tuesday, 24 June 2025 at 11.45 for 12.30.
The Honourable Society of Lincoln’s Inn is the oldest of the four Inns of Court dating back to 1422. The Great Hall was opened by Queen Victoria in 1845. It is complete with Minstrels’ Gallery, striking fresco and a ceiling of beautifully worked oak. It is described as one of the most impressive surviving buildings of its kind in London.
A 3-course lunch with welcome drinks reception is offered at £45.00 per person. The welcome drinks will be at the Members Common Room.
The dress code for lunch in the Great Hall is business or lounge suits, court dress or smart casual dress.
Places were allocated this time by tickets drawn at our AGM.
BBC Symphony Orchestra & Chorus 2024-25 Barbican Season
Oramo conducts Mahler’s Tenth and The Lark Ascending
19:30 Fri 24 Jan 2025 Barbican, London
This concert at the Barbican includes the last composition by Kaija Saariaho amongst other interesting pieces.
“ Hush…when the great Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho died in 2023, she left behind her a trumpet concerto unlike any other, crafted to showcase the remarkable, genre-crossing artistry of trumpeter Verneri Pohjola. He gives its UK premiere tonight. a final, profoundly moving testament from one of our century’s greatest creative spirits, as she took her own ‘journey to silence’.
A jewel as rare as this demands a very special setting, and Sakari Oramo – a lifelong admirer of Saariaho’s music – has placed Hush at the centre of a concert that begins with Gustav Mahler gazing into the abyss, and ends with Vaughan Williams’s vision of beauty soaring clear and free. BBC SO leader Igor Yuzefovich plays The Lark Ascending, and the BBC Symphony Chorus sings Towards the Unknown Region: another timeless meditation on an eternal question. “
See also and for tickets: BBC Symphony Orchestra & Chorus 2024-25 Barbican Season Oramo conducts Mahler’s Tenth and The Lark Ascending – BBC Symphony Orchestra – BBC
While not Finnish (apart from a certain Finn performing in it on this occasion):
The Swedenhielms – A famous play by Hjalmar Bergman (1883-1931)
There will be a staged, costumed, playreading in English of this play by members of the Leytonstone Library Playreading Group on Monday 13th January 2025 at 7:30 p.m. at Leytonstone Library, Church Lane, Leytonstone E11 1HG
Admission free with voluntary leaving collection. Leytonstone Library is easily accessible from Leytonstone Station on the Central Line.
The play is set in Stockholm in November 1924. It takes place in the home of Rolf Swedenhielm, an engineer who is proud of his aristocratic ancestors. His three adult children, Rolf Junior a scientist, Julia an actress and Bo an Air Force Lieutenant, are scouring the paper to see if their father has won that year’s Nobel Prize for Physics. This will be a great honour and the 120,000Kr prize will be very useful as all lead extravagant lives. Their aunt Marta Boman who raised the three after their mother died young is more concerned with practical matters.
A young reporter Pedersen hopes to get his first story interviewing the family. Father comes back and finally learns that he has won the prize but then Eriksson, a long-lost childhood friend from Father’s hometown of Nora, Örebro, arrives with a fistful of IOUs and things turn darker. Come along on Monday to see what happens next.
The play was filmed in 1935 shortly after the playwright’s early death with a cast including a young Ingrid Bergman as Astrid, Bo’s wealthy fiancée. The play has been performed a few times in England under the names The Nobel Prize, The Family First and The Swedenhielms. This includes a 1960 professional production in Birmingham in which Brian Blessed played the father.
Leytonstone Library Playreading Group was founded in 1936 and have been meeting regularly ever since and come from a wide range of backgrounds. They are grateful to the Leytonstone Ward of the London Borough of Waltham Forest for a Community Funding Grant. For more information please email Leytonstoneplayreading@gmail.com
Finnish designers played a huge part in the ‘Scandinavian Modern’ movement of the 1950s. It was a style that took America and Europe by storm with its cool functionality, natural materials and organic curves. But, lurking behind the scenes, were hidden hands and powerful political projects. It wasn’t just the social democratic urge to change consumer taste into something more rational. Nordic design became embroiled in a US plot to unite the West under one ‘democratic’ design idiom, to unsettle the Soviet bloc, and to demonstrate that America had culture and taste. Indeed Finland covertly used the opportunity to display its Western credentials to America at a time of Finlandisation.
This illustrated talk features designers and architects including Alvar & Aino Aalto, Tapio Wirkkala, Timo Sarpaneva, Bruno Mathsson, Josef Frank, Astrid Sampe, Hans Wegner, Finn Juhl, Arne Jacobsen, Charles & Ray Eames and George Nelson. It looks at major design exhibitions between 1930 and 1960 in Stockholm, Berlin, the United States, Helsinki, Helsingborg and Moscow. And it examines why modernism became such a useful Cold War tool, why ‘Finnish’ design suddenly became ‘Scandinavian’, and how a functionalist movement for the masses was transformed into an elite luxury style.
Bio:
James Vaux is a member of the Anglo-Finnish Society and an Accredited Arts Society Lecturer, specialising in Nordic art and design and modernism more generally. In 2025 he has 50 talks all over the country and hopes to spread a wider understanding of Nordic culture. He holds a recent MA in Scandinavian Studies (Language, Culture and History) from UCL, where his dissertation was on the politics of Nordic design in the Cold War. He has also studied design at the Inchbald School and Mid-Century Modern at Sotheby’s Institute. Before retirement he was a managing director and global partner of the international bank Rothschild & Co. He was head of the bank’s Nordic operations, which he founded together with Pehr Gyllenhammar. He lived and worked in Stockholm, and amongst other roles across the region he acted as an adviser to the Finnish, Danish and Swedish Ministries of Finance.
Pre-Talk Reception and Lunch:
A pre-talk drinks reception and lunch is organised at Lincoln’s Inn. The lunch price includes the talk. For talk only, £5 members; £10 non-members. The lunch and talk are open to our Anglo-Nordic friends at the members price. The lunch includes welcome drinks and a two-course meal. A dessert and wine at lunch can be ordered on the day at your own expense. Please indicate any dietary requirements to the Hon. Secretary at secretary@anglofinnishsociety.org.uk. You can book for the lunch until the morning of 15 September 2025 but for the talk you can book later subject to availability.
To book to attend, please use Eventbrite: ‘Scandinavian Modern’: Nordic Design Behind the Scenes Tickets, Tue, Sep 23, 2025 at 12:00 PM | Eventbrite