A Summer with Beethoven

This newly added summer concert is one leg of an international piano marathon featuring piano concertos from around ten countries across Europe: Paris, Lisbon, Vienna, Athens … From Stockholm and Konserthuset we hear Eric Lu perform Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 3 with the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra and Ryan Bancroft.

The American pianist Eric Lu won the Chopin Piano Competition in Warsaw in 2025, having previously won the Leeds International Piano Competition. This is his debut with the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra, although he has collaborated with Ryan Bancroft on several notable occasions.

Ludwig van Beethoven’s Third Piano Concerto is one of the great masterpieces of the piano repertoire. It is the only one of Beethoven’s piano concertos in a minor key, and the music is both more powerful and more personal than in the concertos he had composed earlier. The concert opens in the world of fairy tales. Stravinsky’s The Song of the Nightingale is based on Hans Christian Andersen’s story of the nightingale and the Chinese emperor.

Other contributions to this international piano marathon feature pianists such as Martha Argerich, Bruce Liu and Mao Fujita, and conductors including Klaus Mäkelä with the Orchestre de Paris. The entire project will be filmed by C Major Entertainment and broadcast on 21 June during an 8–9 hour programme on the ARTE channel. Around half of the concerts will be broadcast live. In Sweden, it will be shown on SVT at a later date.