ARCTICA — Symphony No. 4
for Piano, Choir and Orchestra
Premiered on 30 March 2019 at the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC—with its European debut given by the Oslo Philharmonic on 27 February 2020—Lera Auerbach’s ARCTICA, Symphony No. 4 transforms the concert hall into a polar sound-scape where myth, ritual, and environmental science converge. Commissioned by the National Geographic Society and explorer-in-residence Enric Sala, the work grew out of Auerbach’s immersive travels to the High North, where she encountered both the Arctic’s luminous grandeur and the accelerating collapse of its ecosystems.
At the symphony’s core stands the Angakok, the shaman revered across Inuit cultures. In Auerbach’s dramaturgy the pianist becomes this mediator, journeying back to an age before humankind to implore Sedna, Mother of the Sea, for the renewal of life. Encircling this plea, massed choirs and orchestra utter ritual invocations of the spirits of light/sun, wind, and water. Monumental brass and crystalline percussion evoke the groan of calving glaciers; hushed choral suspensions suggest drifting floes under polar night.
Within Arctic societies the Angakok is more than a ceremonial leader: healer, interpreter of dreams, and guardian of equilibrium between the human realm and the spirit world, the shaman wields ancient knowledge to navigate crises and restore harmony. By placing this figure at the heart of the symphony, Auerbach highlights a wisdom tradition that predates modern science yet remains urgently relevant.
Auerbach—composer, conductor, pianist, poet, and visual artist—penned the multilingual libretto in collaboration with Elders from Inuit communities in Greenland and Canada, ensuring the precision of both meaning and pronunciation. By embedding endangered Arctic languages within the musical fabric, she allows ancestral voices to speak directly to contemporary listeners.
Today’s climate alarms often arrive wrapped in statistics and satellite images, yet ARCTICA reminds us that the warning siren was first sounded by those who lived in dialogue with ice and tide. For millennia, Elders have tracked the rhythms of glaciers, seal migrations, and the subtle tenor of the wind—an empirical record etched in story and ritual rather than spreadsheets. By braiding these observations into symphonic form, Auerbach collapses centuries: orchestral tremors echo the groan of thinning sea-ice while choral whispers in Inuktitut carry data points older than the satellite era. The result is a reckoning in which modern climate urgency is revealed not as a new discovery but as the long-ignored wisdom of peoples who always knew that the fate of ice is inseparable from the fate of humankind.
With ARCTICA, Symphony No. 4, Auerbach weds Indigenous cosmology to contemporary symphonic writing, offering an urgent musical testament that the health of our planet’s frozen frontiers—and therefore of our collective future—depends on listening to voices both ancient and newly awakened.