Also sprach Zarathustra

The Armenian composer Aram Khachaturian's music is familiar to many from the delightful Sabre Dance of the ballet Gayane, and the Adagio from the ballet Spartacus, from which the swooning theme music for the TV series The Onedin Line was borrowed. Khachaturian unquestionably wrote music that captivates listeners.

Unfortunately, his other works have rarely been performed at Konserthuset. Here, it is Jean-Yves Thibaudet who takes on the vibrant and powerful piano concerto, with a beautifully flowing and dreamlike middle movement where the strings are accompanied by a flexatone (imagine playing on a saw!). The distinguished French pianist Thibaudet has been a champion of Khachaturian's music for many years.

Chief Conductor Ryan Bancroft then leads the orchestra in the classic Also sprach Zarathustra by Richard Strauss. This tone poem, with its powerful – not to mention iconic – opening, is inspired by Friedrich Nietzsche's philosophical novel. It is well known, of course, that Strauss's music was used in the film 2001: A Space Odyssey, but Stanley Kubrick actually also placed music from Khachaturian's ballet Gayane in the same film.

The concert opens with the world premiere of a newly written work by the young Swedish composer Zacharias Wolfe (born 1996). Here begins a new collaboration with the Royal College of Music in Stockholm: each season a newly written work by a master's student will be performed. Wolfe's orchestral work Held by Threads is the first.

Learn more about Chief Conductor Ryan Bancroft