Organ Matinée with Oscar Rutberg

Through Konserthuset’s popular organ matinée subscription, audiences get to hear Sweden’s leading organists play the building’s organ – one of the largest in Europe, with 6,100 pipes.  

This organ concert features Oscar Rutberg from Boden, Sweden, who was the winner of the Swedish Organ Society’s 2018 national organ competition for young organists. Following his music studies in Piteå, he moved to Stockholm, where he graduated from the Royal College of Music with a bachelor’s degree. Since 2020 he is the organist of the Oscar Parish in Stockholm. Oscar Rutberg will present a varied programme of French, German and Swiss organ music.

French organ virtuoso and composer Jeanne Demessieux worked as an organist in Sainte Madeleine in Paris. Her Douze Choral-préludes were composed in 1947. Forty years earlier, Max Reger composed his symphonic Fantasia and Fugue based on Dante’s Inferno, and this piece of music is characterised by a high degree of density and harmonic instability. The following year, he composed the twelve solo pieces, including the Fugue in D major.

German Ernst Pepping was a prominent twentieth-century composer, primarily in the area of sacred music. His music often engages in dialogues with works by older masters – as here, in a Fugue on the name Bach. Guy Bovet, born 1942, is a Swiss organist and composer who also writes on the subject of the history of the organ. His extensive knowledge of historical instruments has made him a popular consultant for the renovation of old organs. His Toccata is from 1993.