Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra

The Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra performs at Konserthuset led by its chief conductor, Finnish Santtu-Matias Rouvali. Icelandic Vikingur Olafsson is a pianist who has truly taken the world by storm in recent years. He is awarded the prestigious Rolf Schock Prize of 2022 ”for his groundbreaking and successful work on developing and strengthen classical music”.At this concert, we hear him perform a newly composed piano concerto by John Adams.

Adams was featured at Konserthuset’s Composer Festival 2005, and is undoubtedly currently the most prominent composer from the US. His works often have evocative titles, as exemplified by the piano concerto Must The Devil Have All The Good Tunes? – composed for Yuja Wang, who performed the world premiere of the piece in 2019. This awesome and rhythmically forceful music is utterly masterful – indeed, it is diabolical! 

The piano concerto is preceded by Saint-Saëns short symphonic poem Dance macabre – Dance of Death – referring to the legend of Death fiddling on Halloween, as skeletons dance on their graves.

Sergei Prokofiev’s last symphony, the relatively mild seventh, was composed in 1952, the year before his passing, and he was marked by the fact that the Soviet regime had condemned his previous symphony. Adding to this, he was broke and hoped to win the Stalin Prize with the new symphony, and thereby secure some money. His desire was to find a clear musical language and greater ”simplicity”. This new simplicity became a hallmark of Prokofiev’s later output. But alas, the clear and restrained seventh symphony was not awarded the Stalin Prize. It was however awarded the Lenin Prize posthumously in 1957.