Trifonov plays Schumann

We welcome the absolutely brilliant guest pianist Daniil Trifonov for the third time in a short period – most recently in the TV broadcast of the Nobel Prize Concert. At just 25 years old, he has already played with the world’s top orchestras. This time, he will appear as the soloist in Robert Schumann’s Piano Concerto. It was Robert’s wife, Clara, who pestered him to compose orchestral music. And when the piano concerto was complete in 1845, Clara tackled the solo.

The Schumann concerto is preceded by an overture composed by Grazyna Bacewicz (1909–69), the luminous Polish composer – and pianist, and violinist – who composed seven violin concertos (!), four symphonies and vast amounts of chamber music. The overture from the 1940s radiates a powerful energy with a propulsive rhythm in a neoclassical musicality.

British Andrew Manze has conducted the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra on numerous occasions and with his expertise and enthusiasm, he is an incredibly exciting musical personality. We will also get a taste of his extensive familiarity with older music when he conducts Fantasia by the English Baroque composer William Lawes.

The programme will conclude with Vaughan Williams’ Symphony No. 6, composed towards the end of World War II and occasionally called a war symphony. The composer defended himself in regards to the epithet. “Why do people not understand that perhaps one simply wishes to write a piece of music?” he wondered. He was not often one for epigraphs, but he described the final movement in the symphony with a quotation from Shakespeare’s The Tempest: “We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep”.