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Sara Trobäck has been Principal concertmaster of the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra since 2002. She studied with Tibor Fülep at the Gothenburg Academy of Music and with György Pauk at the Royal Academy of Music in London. In connection with her graduation concert in 2001, she received the academy's prestigious Professional Diploma and the Dove Award. Sara Trobäck has also participated in master classes with Lord Yehudi Menuhin, Ruggiero Ricci and Joshua Bell. As a soloist, she has appeared with the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra, the Swedish Chamber Orchestra, the Stockholm Sinfonietta and the Helsingborg Symphony Orchestra, among others. In 2010, she premiered a violin concerto by Johannes Jansson dedicated to her and the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra. Her London debut took place in the summer of 1999 when she performed Tchaikovsky's Violin Concerto with the London Soloists in St Martin-in-the-Fields. Sara Trobäck has also given concerts in Scotland, Germany, France, Spain, Portugal and China. In 2002 she formed Trio Poseidon together with solo cellist Claes Gunnarsson and pianist Per Lundberg. The trio has among other things recorded Beethoven's Triple Concerto. Sara Trobäck plays a Giovanni Battista Guadagnini on loan from the Järnåker Foundation.

Philip Jalmelid is a musical artist and singer, known from the largest Swedish stages. He has played Tony in West Side Story at Norrlandsoperan, an acclaimed Anatolij in Chess at Gothenburg Opera and has been seen in Hair at the Stockholm Stadsteater as well as Sunset Boulevard and Les Misérables at the Wermland Opera. He has also participated in concert versions of Chess and Kristina from Duvemåla. Philip Jalmelid has also been seen in Allsång på Skansen, Bingolotto, Så ska det låta and Doobidoo. At the Malmö Opera he has played, among other things, Jakob in Jesus Christ Superstar, Marius in Les Misérables, Chris in Miss Saigon, Maxim de Winter in Rebecca and Pasha Antipov/Strelnikov in Doctor Zhivago.

Comedian and presenter Anna Mannheimer has appeared in TV and radio shows such as Let’s Go, Detta Har Hänt and Mannheimer och Tengby . She was also a member of the Rally comedy show on Sveriges Radio P3. With Mia Skäringer she has had one of Sweden’s largest podcasts. Together with her husband Peter Apelgren she has written and performed in stage plays such as Gift, Kids and Döden – Andra sidan e ni klara?.

Comedian and artist Peter Apelgren is a well-known Gothenburg profile. In 2024 he presented his stand-up show Livets Efterrätt. Together with his wife Anna Mannheimer, he has written and performed in stage shows such as Gift, Kids and Döden – Andra sidan e ni klara?. Peter Apelgren is also known from television programs such as På Spåret and Kulturfrågan Kontrapunkt on SVT and also made the cult program Rally on Sveriges Radio P3.

Tommy Jonsson is a Swedish organist and musician. He is a trained organist at the University of Music and Drama in Gothenburg and has had assignments as an accompanist and arranger at the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra, the Gothenburg Opera, the Folk Theatre and the City Theatre in Gothenburg. He is an organist at the Church of Sweden, and also participates in stage productions as an arranger, musical director and musician.

The Gothenburg Symphony Vocal Ensemble (GSVE) was formed in 2016 and consists of 12 professional singers. The ensemble works both as part of the Gothenburg Symphony Choir in major symphonic works performed together with the Gothenburg Symphony, and as an independent ensemble under the direction of Katie Thomas. GSVE is a group of experienced and versatile singers, who perform varied programs and explore a wide repertoire, from medieval music to newly commissioned works. The ensemble has previously collaborated with, among others, the Helsingborg Symphony Orchestra and the Barockakademin Göteborgs Symfoniker and performs regular vocal programs both in Gothenburg's Concert Hall and around the Västra Götaland region.

Sara Trobäck has been Principal concertmaster of the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra since 2002. She studied with Tibor Fülep at the Gothenburg Academy of Music and with György Pauk at the Royal Academy of Music in London. In connection with her graduation concert in 2001, she received the academy's prestigious Professional Diploma and the Dove Award. Sara Trobäck has also participated in master classes with Lord Yehudi Menuhin, Ruggiero Ricci and Joshua Bell. As a soloist, she has appeared with the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra, the Swedish Chamber Orchestra, the Stockholm Sinfonietta and the Helsingborg Symphony Orchestra, among others. In 2010, she premiered a violin concerto by Johannes Jansson dedicated to her and the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra. Her London debut took place in the summer of 1999 when she performed Tchaikovsky's Violin Concerto with the London Soloists in St Martin-in-the-Fields. Sara Trobäck has also given concerts in Scotland, Germany, France, Spain, Portugal and China. In 2002 she formed Trio Poseidon together with solo cellist Claes Gunnarsson and pianist Per Lundberg. The trio has among other things recorded Beethoven's Triple Concerto. Sara Trobäck plays a Giovanni Battista Guadagnini on loan from the Järnåker Foundation.

Philip Jalmelid is a musical artist and singer, known from the largest Swedish stages. He has played Tony in West Side Story at Norrlandsoperan, an acclaimed Anatolij in Chess at Gothenburg Opera and has been seen in Hair at the Stockholm Stadsteater as well as Sunset Boulevard and Les Misérables at the Wermland Opera. He has also participated in concert versions of Chess and Kristina from Duvemåla. Philip Jalmelid has also been seen in Allsång på Skansen, Bingolotto, Så ska det låta and Doobidoo. At the Malmö Opera he has played, among other things, Jakob in Jesus Christ Superstar, Marius in Les Misérables, Chris in Miss Saigon, Maxim de Winter in Rebecca and Pasha Antipov/Strelnikov in Doctor Zhivago.

Comedian and presenter Anna Mannheimer has appeared in TV and radio shows such as Let’s Go, Detta Har Hänt and Mannheimer och Tengby . She was also a member of the Rally comedy show on Sveriges Radio P3. With Mia Skäringer she has had one of Sweden’s largest podcasts. Together with her husband Peter Apelgren she has written and performed in stage plays such as Gift, Kids and Döden – Andra sidan e ni klara?.

Comedian and artist Peter Apelgren is a well-known Gothenburg profile. In 2024 he presented his stand-up show Livets Efterrätt. Together with his wife Anna Mannheimer, he has written and performed in stage shows such as Gift, Kids and Döden – Andra sidan e ni klara?. Peter Apelgren is also known from television programs such as På Spåret and Kulturfrågan Kontrapunkt on SVT and also made the cult program Rally on Sveriges Radio P3.

Tommy Jonsson is a Swedish organist and musician. He is a trained organist at the University of Music and Drama in Gothenburg and has had assignments as an accompanist and arranger at the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra, the Gothenburg Opera, the Folk Theatre and the City Theatre in Gothenburg. He is an organist at the Church of Sweden, and also participates in stage productions as an arranger, musical director and musician.

The Gothenburg Symphony Vocal Ensemble (GSVE) was formed in 2016 and consists of 12 professional singers. The ensemble works both as part of the Gothenburg Symphony Choir in major symphonic works performed together with the Gothenburg Symphony, and as an independent ensemble under the direction of Katie Thomas. GSVE is a group of experienced and versatile singers, who perform varied programs and explore a wide repertoire, from medieval music to newly commissioned works. The ensemble has previously collaborated with, among others, the Helsingborg Symphony Orchestra and the Barockakademin Göteborgs Symfoniker and performs regular vocal programs both in Gothenburg's Concert Hall and around the Västra Götaland region.

Not all composers write their most famous works when they are 19 years old. One who did was George Enescu with his two Romanian Rhapsodies from 1901. They accompanied him throughout his life. In his later years, he is said to have lamented how they overshadowed his other music. Enescu came from Romania and was a bit of a master at everything he did. It has been said of his memory that he could recreate all of Beethoven's works if they were lost. He picked up the term rhapsody from Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsodies. It is a title that signals spontaneity, improvisation and movement. But also that different parts have been joined together. In the rhapsodies, Enescu portrayed a romantic image of his homeland. The first begins with the folk song “Am un leu” which is said to have been the first Enescu learned at the age of 4. After the calm introduction, the piece bursts into lively dances. The piece depicts peasants stamping and hooting at an increasingly fast pace. It is an exotic dream image of a world that may have been – but is no longer.

Louise Farrenc (1804-1875) Symphony No 3 Adagio - Allegro Adagio cantabile Scherzo. Vivace Finale. Allegro Louise Farrenc has a clear place in music history as one of the most prominent and remarkable female composers. She became the first woman to be appointed professor at the Paris Conservatory, and won the battle to receive the same high salary as her male colleagues. Her third symphony now ends up on lists of the world's best symphonies, as updated list writers increasingly open their ears to female geniuses. The symphony carries, among other things, one of the most magnificent finales in the orchestral repertoire. She wrote the symphony in 1847, but it was not performed until two years later by the concert company at the Conservatory. The first movement moves subtly from a soft introduction in the oboe part. Immediately, agitated strings and timpani fall in, an unexpected build-up in a short time. Farrenc trusts the listener to follow along on the journey, and complements the high energy with quotes from Beethoven. Sudden changes in dynamics heighten the tension. The second movement's adagio begins with a lyrical clarinet melody and forms a simple and elegant interlude, calm and unwavering. The third movement's scherzo has forward momentum, momentum and tension that constantly bubbles beneath the surface, paused only during the central woodwind trio. The decisive unison strings that begin the final movement signal a return to a darker, bolder energy. Just as in Mozart's Symphony No. 40, passion and emotion emerge within the firm framework of classicism. With a power worthy of Romanticism, the finale concludes with three triumphant closing chords.

Allegro Andante Vivace non troppo Johannes Brahms composed his Double Concerto for violin, cello and orchestra in the summer of 1887. It was his last work for orchestra and, despite being only 30 minutes long, is a truly magnificent work. Brahms himself called the work “entertaining” and a “joke” – words that a listener finds difficult to reconcile with such an intense and powerful concert. The usual understanding of Brahms’ Double Concerto is that its serious appearance goes back to the conflict that arose between Brahms and his friend, the violinist Joseph Joachim, regarding an affair between Joachim’s wife and Brahms’ publisher. The concerto – which was premiered by Joachim and the cellist Robert Hausmann with Brahms conducting – is said to have been an outstretched hand after several years of silence. An emotional melody in the cello turns gently towards the violinist, and in the end the two are united. The double concerto received mixed reviews. Some, such as Clara Schumann, considered it lacking in warmth. Today it stands as one of the last great concertos of the 19th century, dating back to Mozart and Beethoven – and a unique example of Brahms' late style of composition for full orchestra, in which he also uses the full range of the solo instruments.

The Gothenburg Symphony was formed in 1905 and today consists of 109 musicians. The orchestra's base is Gothenburg Concert Hall at Götaplatsen that has gathered music lovers since 1935. Since the 2019-2020 season, Barbara Hannigan is Principal guest conductor. We are also a proud partner of Barbara Hannigan's Equilibrium mentoring program focusing on young singers at the start of their careers. The title Principal Guest Conductor is shared by Pekka Kuusisto from 2025. Wilhelm Stenhammar was the orchestra's chief conductor from 1907 to 1922. He gave the orchestra a strong Nordic profile and invited colleagues Carl Nielsen and Jean Sibelius to the orchestra. Under the direction of conductor Neeme Järvi from 1982-2004, the orchestra made a series of international tours as well as a hundred disc recordings and established themselves among Europe's leading orchestras. In 1996, the Swedish Riksdag appointed the Gothenburg Symphony as Sweden's National Orchestra. In recent decades, the orchestra has had prominent chief conductors such as Santtu-Matias Rouvali, Mario Venzago and Gustavo Dudamel, following Kent Nagano as Principal Guest conductor. Anna-Karin Larsson is CEO and artistic director, Gustavo Dudamel honorary conductor and Neeme Järvi chief conductor emeritus. The orchestra's owner is the Västra Götaland Region. The Gothenburg Symphony works regularly with conductors such as Herbert Blomstedt, Joana Carneiro, Jukka-Pekka Saraste, Christian Zacharias and Anja Bihlmaier.

Violinist Pekka Kuusisto is known for his artistic freedom and innovative approach to repertoire. He is the artistic director of the Norwegian Chamber Orchestra and, since 2023, principal guest conductor and artistic partner of the Helsinki Philharmonic. Season 2025-2026 he joined as Principal Guest Conductor of the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra. He has also been appointed as chief conductor of the Tokyo Metropolitan Symphony Orchestra from 2028. In season 2024-2025 Kuusisto appeared with Helsinki Philharmonic and Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra as soloist and conductor, play-conducted the Norwegian Chamber Orchestra, Die Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen, Swedish Chamber Orchestra, Danish National Symphony Orchestra and the Scottish Chamber Orchestra. He conducted the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra, Lahti Sinfonia and Ostrobothninan Symphony as well as appeared soloist with Detroit Symphony Orchestra, the NSO Dublin, Brussels Philharmonic, Orchestre National de Lyon with André de Ridder, the NDR Elbphilharmonie Orchestra, Los Angeles Philharmonic and Boston Symphony Orchestra. Kuusisto continues his collaboration with Gabriel Kahane as Council following successful tours in the US and Australia. Kuusisto gets involved across the entire artistic spectrum. He has collaborated with musicians such as Hauschka & Kosminen, Dutch neurologist Erik Scherder, electro pioneer Brian Crabtree, jazz trumpeter Arve Henriksen, juggler Jay Gilligan, accordionist Dermot Dunne and folk artist Sam Amidon. In 2024, Kuusisto was featured in two releases on Sony – Bryce Dessner’s album SOLOS where he performed composer’s Ornament and Crime for solo violin, and on Anna Clyne’s and The Knights album Shorthand performing Prince of Clouds for two violins. In 2023, Kuusisto released an album for BIS as conductor in Jaakko Kuusisto's symphony, and one for Alba as violinist with Malin Broman and the Ostrobothnian Chamber Orchestra with works by Tarrodi, Byström, Larsson and Zinovjev. Composers who have written violin concertos for Kuusisto include Nico Muhly, Sebastian Fagerlund and Bryce Dessner. Pekka Kuusisto plays an Antonio Stradivarius from 1695 on generous loan from Anders Sveaas Charitable Trust.

Andreas Brantelid was born in Copenhagen and made his soloist debut at the age of 14 in a performance with the Royal Danish Orchestra in Copenhagen. Today, he is one of the most sought-after performing artists from Scandinavia. Highlights include appearances with the London Philharmonic, City of Birmingham Symphony, BBC Symphony, and BBC Philharmonic Orchestras, Tonhalle Orchester Zurich, Mahler Chamber Orchestra and Brussels Philharmonic. He has worked with many distinguished conductors including Andris Nelsons, Esa-Pekka Salonen, Philippe Herreweghe, Vasily Petrenko, Thomas Dausgaard, Pablo Heras-Casado, Andrew Manze, Sakari Oramo, Jukka-Pekka Saraste, Robin Ticciati and Heinrich Schiff. Among the musicians who inspired him are pianist Bengt Forsberg and violinist Nils-Erik Sparf, both of whom he has played with since 2002 in different formats. Andreas Brantelid has also collaborated with artists such as Daniel Barenboim, Gidon Kremer, Joshua Bell, Vadim Repin, Nikolaj Znaider, Lawrence Power and Paul Badura-Skoda. Recently he has formed a trio with Austrian violinist Benjamin Schmid and Norwegian pianist Christian Ihle Hadland. He also performs at festivals and has been a member of the Lincoln Center Chamber Music Society. His debut disc of the Tchaikovsky, Schumann and Saint-Saëns cello concertos with the Danish National Symphony Orchestra was released by EMI in 2008. He released a much acclaimed CD with both Haydn Cello Concertos in 2021 with the period ensemble Concerto Copenhagen and his release 48 Strings from 2022 features music for 1, 2, 4 and 12 celli. Andreas Brantelid won first prize in the 2006 Eurovison Young Musicians Competion and in the 2007 International Paulo Cello Competition. In 2015 he received the Carl Nielsen Prize in Copenhagen. He plays the 1707 ‘Boni-Hegar’ Stradivarius, which has been made available to him by generous support of Christen Sveaas.

Not all composers write their most famous works when they are 19 years old. One who did was George Enescu with his two Romanian Rhapsodies from 1901. They accompanied him throughout his life. In his later years, he is said to have lamented how they overshadowed his other music. Enescu came from Romania and was a bit of a master at everything he did. It has been said of his memory that he could recreate all of Beethoven's works if they were lost. He picked up the term rhapsody from Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsodies. It is a title that signals spontaneity, improvisation and movement. But also that different parts have been joined together. In the rhapsodies, Enescu portrayed a romantic image of his homeland. The first begins with the folk song “Am un leu” which is said to have been the first Enescu learned at the age of 4. After the calm introduction, the piece bursts into lively dances. The piece depicts peasants stamping and hooting at an increasingly fast pace. It is an exotic dream image of a world that may have been – but is no longer.

Louise Farrenc (1804-1875) Symphony No 3 Adagio - Allegro Adagio cantabile Scherzo. Vivace Finale. Allegro Louise Farrenc has a clear place in music history as one of the most prominent and remarkable female composers. She became the first woman to be appointed professor at the Paris Conservatory, and won the battle to receive the same high salary as her male colleagues. Her third symphony now ends up on lists of the world's best symphonies, as updated list writers increasingly open their ears to female geniuses. The symphony carries, among other things, one of the most magnificent finales in the orchestral repertoire. She wrote the symphony in 1847, but it was not performed until two years later by the concert company at the Conservatory. The first movement moves subtly from a soft introduction in the oboe part. Immediately, agitated strings and timpani fall in, an unexpected build-up in a short time. Farrenc trusts the listener to follow along on the journey, and complements the high energy with quotes from Beethoven. Sudden changes in dynamics heighten the tension. The second movement's adagio begins with a lyrical clarinet melody and forms a simple and elegant interlude, calm and unwavering. The third movement's scherzo has forward momentum, momentum and tension that constantly bubbles beneath the surface, paused only during the central woodwind trio. The decisive unison strings that begin the final movement signal a return to a darker, bolder energy. Just as in Mozart's Symphony No. 40, passion and emotion emerge within the firm framework of classicism. With a power worthy of Romanticism, the finale concludes with three triumphant closing chords.

Allegro Andante Vivace non troppo Johannes Brahms composed his Double Concerto for violin, cello and orchestra in the summer of 1887. It was his last work for orchestra and, despite being only 30 minutes long, is a truly magnificent work. Brahms himself called the work “entertaining” and a “joke” – words that a listener finds difficult to reconcile with such an intense and powerful concert. The usual understanding of Brahms’ Double Concerto is that its serious appearance goes back to the conflict that arose between Brahms and his friend, the violinist Joseph Joachim, regarding an affair between Joachim’s wife and Brahms’ publisher. The concerto – which was premiered by Joachim and the cellist Robert Hausmann with Brahms conducting – is said to have been an outstretched hand after several years of silence. An emotional melody in the cello turns gently towards the violinist, and in the end the two are united. The double concerto received mixed reviews. Some, such as Clara Schumann, considered it lacking in warmth. Today it stands as one of the last great concertos of the 19th century, dating back to Mozart and Beethoven – and a unique example of Brahms' late style of composition for full orchestra, in which he also uses the full range of the solo instruments.

The Gothenburg Symphony was formed in 1905 and today consists of 109 musicians. The orchestra's base is Gothenburg Concert Hall at Götaplatsen that has gathered music lovers since 1935. Since the 2019-2020 season, Barbara Hannigan is Principal guest conductor. We are also a proud partner of Barbara Hannigan's Equilibrium mentoring program focusing on young singers at the start of their careers. The title Principal Guest Conductor is shared by Pekka Kuusisto from 2025. Wilhelm Stenhammar was the orchestra's chief conductor from 1907 to 1922. He gave the orchestra a strong Nordic profile and invited colleagues Carl Nielsen and Jean Sibelius to the orchestra. Under the direction of conductor Neeme Järvi from 1982-2004, the orchestra made a series of international tours as well as a hundred disc recordings and established themselves among Europe's leading orchestras. In 1996, the Swedish Riksdag appointed the Gothenburg Symphony as Sweden's National Orchestra. In recent decades, the orchestra has had prominent chief conductors such as Santtu-Matias Rouvali, Mario Venzago and Gustavo Dudamel, following Kent Nagano as Principal Guest conductor. Anna-Karin Larsson is CEO and artistic director, Gustavo Dudamel honorary conductor and Neeme Järvi chief conductor emeritus. The orchestra's owner is the Västra Götaland Region. The Gothenburg Symphony works regularly with conductors such as Herbert Blomstedt, Joana Carneiro, Jukka-Pekka Saraste, Christian Zacharias and Anja Bihlmaier.

Violinist Pekka Kuusisto is known for his artistic freedom and innovative approach to repertoire. He is the artistic director of the Norwegian Chamber Orchestra and, since 2023, principal guest conductor and artistic partner of the Helsinki Philharmonic. Season 2025-2026 he joined as Principal Guest Conductor of the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra. He has also been appointed as chief conductor of the Tokyo Metropolitan Symphony Orchestra from 2028. In season 2024-2025 Kuusisto appeared with Helsinki Philharmonic and Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra as soloist and conductor, play-conducted the Norwegian Chamber Orchestra, Die Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen, Swedish Chamber Orchestra, Danish National Symphony Orchestra and the Scottish Chamber Orchestra. He conducted the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra, Lahti Sinfonia and Ostrobothninan Symphony as well as appeared soloist with Detroit Symphony Orchestra, the NSO Dublin, Brussels Philharmonic, Orchestre National de Lyon with André de Ridder, the NDR Elbphilharmonie Orchestra, Los Angeles Philharmonic and Boston Symphony Orchestra. Kuusisto continues his collaboration with Gabriel Kahane as Council following successful tours in the US and Australia. Kuusisto gets involved across the entire artistic spectrum. He has collaborated with musicians such as Hauschka & Kosminen, Dutch neurologist Erik Scherder, electro pioneer Brian Crabtree, jazz trumpeter Arve Henriksen, juggler Jay Gilligan, accordionist Dermot Dunne and folk artist Sam Amidon. In 2024, Kuusisto was featured in two releases on Sony – Bryce Dessner’s album SOLOS where he performed composer’s Ornament and Crime for solo violin, and on Anna Clyne’s and The Knights album Shorthand performing Prince of Clouds for two violins. In 2023, Kuusisto released an album for BIS as conductor in Jaakko Kuusisto's symphony, and one for Alba as violinist with Malin Broman and the Ostrobothnian Chamber Orchestra with works by Tarrodi, Byström, Larsson and Zinovjev. Composers who have written violin concertos for Kuusisto include Nico Muhly, Sebastian Fagerlund and Bryce Dessner. Pekka Kuusisto plays an Antonio Stradivarius from 1695 on generous loan from Anders Sveaas Charitable Trust.

Andreas Brantelid was born in Copenhagen and made his soloist debut at the age of 14 in a performance with the Royal Danish Orchestra in Copenhagen. Today, he is one of the most sought-after performing artists from Scandinavia. Highlights include appearances with the London Philharmonic, City of Birmingham Symphony, BBC Symphony, and BBC Philharmonic Orchestras, Tonhalle Orchester Zurich, Mahler Chamber Orchestra and Brussels Philharmonic. He has worked with many distinguished conductors including Andris Nelsons, Esa-Pekka Salonen, Philippe Herreweghe, Vasily Petrenko, Thomas Dausgaard, Pablo Heras-Casado, Andrew Manze, Sakari Oramo, Jukka-Pekka Saraste, Robin Ticciati and Heinrich Schiff. Among the musicians who inspired him are pianist Bengt Forsberg and violinist Nils-Erik Sparf, both of whom he has played with since 2002 in different formats. Andreas Brantelid has also collaborated with artists such as Daniel Barenboim, Gidon Kremer, Joshua Bell, Vadim Repin, Nikolaj Znaider, Lawrence Power and Paul Badura-Skoda. Recently he has formed a trio with Austrian violinist Benjamin Schmid and Norwegian pianist Christian Ihle Hadland. He also performs at festivals and has been a member of the Lincoln Center Chamber Music Society. His debut disc of the Tchaikovsky, Schumann and Saint-Saëns cello concertos with the Danish National Symphony Orchestra was released by EMI in 2008. He released a much acclaimed CD with both Haydn Cello Concertos in 2021 with the period ensemble Concerto Copenhagen and his release 48 Strings from 2022 features music for 1, 2, 4 and 12 celli. Andreas Brantelid won first prize in the 2006 Eurovison Young Musicians Competion and in the 2007 International Paulo Cello Competition. In 2015 he received the Carl Nielsen Prize in Copenhagen. He plays the 1707 ‘Boni-Hegar’ Stradivarius, which has been made available to him by generous support of Christen Sveaas.

Johann Strauss II (1825-1899) Rosen aus dem Süden Op 388, arr Schönberg "Roses from the South" is a waltz medley taken from the operetta Das Spitzentuch der Königin. The waltz was dedicated to King Umberto I of Italy in 1880 and was performed at the Strauss Orchestra's regular Sunday concerts at the Musikverein in Vienna. To this day, the waltz is one of Johann Strauss's most beloved and is included in both New Year's concerts and Hollywood films. In 1921, Arnold Schönberg made this arrangement for his musical company.

Clara Schumann (1819-1996) Piano Trio g minor Op 17 Allegro moderato Scherzo: Tempo di Menuetto Andante Allegretto Clara Schumann's piano trio was a work by a mature 25-year-old. The trio is filled with memorable melodies and is astonishingly well-suited for the combination of instruments that Tchaikovsky, among others, considered so difficult to master. Considering the composer's small output and compositional experience, it also exudes a certainty and authority that usually characterizes experienced composers. It was Clara Schumann's intention to dedicate the work to Fanny Hensel, who unfortunately died before the honorary title could be awarded. Hensel herself had written a piano trio that year, 1846. The lyrical first movement, Allegro moderato, begins immediately with a melancholy main theme in the violin part that also continues in the second movement. The slow third movement, in three-part ABA form, is carried forward by themes that are prime examples of the noble melody, which despite great beauty lacks flattering tones.

Robert Schumann (1810-1856) Piano Quintet Op 44 Allegro brillante In modo d'una marcia: Un poco largamente Scherzo: Molto vivace Finale: Allegro ma non troppo Robert Schumann wrote his piano quintet in 1842 for his wife, the star pianist Clara. She premiered it in concert on January 8, 1843. The piece came to set the pattern for the piano quintet genre in general, and Schumann's piece has gained a reputation as one of the foremost chamber music works of the 19th century. There is a relationship with a Schubert work, the Piano Trio No. 2, which Schumann admired. Schumann himself cited Beethoven's String Quintet Op. 29 as another decisive impulse. The stroke of genius was to let the piano lead the development with the strings in an accompanying function. After Mendelssohn played the solo part at a private performance in December 1842, he persuaded Schumann to revise the middle movements and add a second trio to the third movement. The quintet subsequently became one of Clara Schumann's masterpieces. What particularly characterizes the piano quintet is the melodic density and swing of the music, where the impulsiveness of the first movement in the C minor theme of the following mourning march darkens and comes to its senses. The light penetrates again in the scherzo with the two contrasting trio parts, the first soft and gentle, the second restlessly elusive, before the whole work is crowned polyphonically with a 52-bar double fugato. The peculiar character of the mourning march in particular was highlighted by Ingmar Bergman as a leitmotif in the film Fanny and Alexander.

Claes Gunnarsson has toured all over the world as a soloist, chamber musician, orchestral musician and teacher. He made an early and acclaimed debut as soloist in Dvorák's Cello Concerto with the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra. Shortly afterwards he was appointed principal cellist of the orchestra, a position he has held since 1999. As soloist, Claes has appeared in some of the world's most prestigious concert halls, including Wigmore Hall, Queen Elizabeth Hall, St. Petersburg Philharmonie, Shanghai Symphony Hall, Seoul Arts Center and Singapore Symphony Hall. He has also appeared at leading international festivals such as La Folle Journée in Nantes, Music@Menlo in California, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Affinis in Japan, Yuri Temirkanov's Winter Festival in St. Petersburg and the Qingdao International Cello Festival. Conductors he has collaborated with include Neeme Järvi, Kent Nagano, Santtu-Matias Rouvali, Alexander Lazarev, Christian Zacharias and Christopher Warren-Green. As a chamber musician, Claes has collaborated with prominent musicians such as Leonidas Kavakos, Nikolaj Znaider, Christian Zacharias and Hélène Grimaud. Of particular significance is his nearly 25-year collaboration with violinist Sara Trobäck and pianist Per Lundberg in the piano trio Trio Poseidon. The trio has toured extensively both nationally and internationally and made a critically acclaimed recording of Beethoven's Triple Concerto and Brahms' Double Concerto together with the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra and Neeme Järvi for Chandos Records. For Chandos Records, he has also recorded Weinberg's Cello Fantasy and Cello Concerto together with the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra and Thord Svedlund. The recording of the cello concerto was awarded the Diapason d'Or award. He is also represented on BIS Records with the premiere recording of Albert Schnelzer's cello concerto. Claes is regularly invited as a guest solo cellist with, among others, the Oslo Philharmonic, the BBC Symphony Orchestra and the London Symphony Orchestra. In parallel with his concert performances, he is active as a teacher at the Academy of Drama and Music at the University of Gothenburg. Claes plays a cello built in 1707 by David Tecchler, generously on loan from the Järnåker Foundation.

Magnus Fryklund is educated in Copenhagen at the Royal Danish Conservatory of Music. He has been Young Conductor in Residence at the Helsingborg Symphony Orchestra, Conductor in Residence at the Orchester National de Montpellier and house conductor at Malmö Opera. In the 2023-2024 season, he made his debut with the Trondheim Symphony Orchestra and Leif Ove Andsnes, at Wermland Opera (both soloist and conductor) and the Royal Opera in Copenhagen. He also competed in the international Malko Competition for young conductors. Magnus Fryklund has conducted Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra, Norrköping Symphony Orchestra, Odense Symphony Orchestra, Gävle Symphony Orchestra, Dalasinfonietta and Concerto Copenhagen. He has participated in masterclasses with Herbert Blomstedt and Kurt Mazur and has been assistant to Michael Jurowski and Philippe Auguin. Magnus Fryklund is very passionate about opera and has, among other things, performed The Marriage of Figaro at Malmö Opera as both conductor and pianist.

The famous intermezzo comes from the mini-opera Cavalleria rusticana (previously called “På Sicilien” in Swedish). It is a jealousy drama that takes place in a small Sicilian village on Easter Sunday. Pietro Mascagni won an opera competition with Cavalleria rusticana and it became his biggest hit. The rumor must have spread quickly, because the Swedish premiere was held at the Stockholm Opera the same year as the first performance, in December 1890.

Samson and Delilah is a French opera by the Frenchman Camille Saint-Saëns, first premiered in 1877. It is set in biblical times where Samson leads a rebellion against the Philistines. But he is seduced by Delilah who persuades him to cut off his hair, where his strength lies. The music we hear is a wild party, a bacchanal, while dancing in the temple.

This Italian opera is about the girl Manon Lescaut who is deported from France to the United States in the late 18th century. A love drama with complications, and here we hear the symphonic intermezzo between the second and third act.

Lohengrin (1848) is Wagner's last Romantic opera, and centers on the knight Lohengrin. The popular prelude to the first act, which the author Thomas Mann considered "the pinnacle of Romanticism", is often performed as a stand-alone in concerts. Through various musical themes and motifs, we are led into the world of passion, mystery and heroism of the first act. The aria that follows in tonight's program, "Im fernem Land", is called Lohengrin's Grail story - where the myth of the holy vessel is said to symbolize human longing.

The Gothenburg Symphony was formed in 1905 and today consists of 109 musicians. The orchestra's base is Gothenburg Concert Hall at Götaplatsen that has gathered music lovers since 1935. Since the 2019-2020 season, Barbara Hannigan is Principal guest conductor. We are also a proud partner of Barbara Hannigan's Equilibrium mentoring program focusing on young singers at the start of their careers. The title Principal Guest Conductor is shared by Pekka Kuusisto from 2025. Wilhelm Stenhammar was the orchestra's chief conductor from 1907 to 1922. He gave the orchestra a strong Nordic profile and invited colleagues Carl Nielsen and Jean Sibelius to the orchestra. Under the direction of conductor Neeme Järvi from 1982-2004, the orchestra made a series of international tours as well as a hundred disc recordings and established themselves among Europe's leading orchestras. In 1996, the Swedish Riksdag appointed the Gothenburg Symphony as Sweden's National Orchestra. In recent decades, the orchestra has had prominent chief conductors such as Santtu-Matias Rouvali, Mario Venzago and Gustavo Dudamel, following Kent Nagano as Principal Guest conductor. Anna-Karin Larsson is CEO and artistic director, Gustavo Dudamel honorary conductor and Neeme Järvi chief conductor emeritus. The orchestra's owner is the Västra Götaland Region. The Gothenburg Symphony works regularly with conductors such as Herbert Blomstedt, Joana Carneiro, Jukka-Pekka Saraste, Christian Zacharias and Anja Bihlmaier.

Native of Munich, Jonas Kaufmann completed his vocal studies there at the Hochschule für Musik und Theater München. During his first year on stage in Saarbrücken he continued his training with Michael Rhodes in Trier. Hailed as “the world’s greatest tenor” by The Telegraph, Jonas Kaufmann has performed over 70 roles in the world’s leading opera houses. A voice which excels in a large variety of repertoire, Kaufmann has received recognition for his performance of French, German and Italian roles, as well as his performance in recital. Standout roles include Don José, Werther, Don Carlo, Otello, Andrea Chenier, Maurizio, Lohengrin, Parsifal and Florestan, which he has performed at houses such as Teatro alla Scala, Covent Garden, the Bayerische Staatsoper, the Metropolitan Opera, Opernhaus Zürich, Opéra national de Paris, and the Wiener Staatsoper. His performances and recordings have earned him multiple honors and awards including eleven ECHO/OPUS Klassik awards, “Singer of the Year” from several classical music magazines including Opernwelt, Diapason and Musical America. He has been knighted as a Chevalier de l’Ordre de l’Art et des Lettres, and has been named a member of the Bayerischer Maximiliansorden. In 2022 he was appointed Austrian Kammersänger, in 2024 he received the Ordre de la Légion d’honneur. Since September 2024 Jonas Kaufmann is Director of the Tyrolean Festival Erl. This year his schedule included a revival of Leoncavallo’s I Pagliacci at the Wiener Staatsoper, followed by an Asia tour with opera concerts and recitals, a recital tour with Diana Damrau and Helmut Deutsch (songs by Mahler and Strauss), the title role in Parsifal at the Erl Festival, a new production of I Pagliacci at the Bayerische Staatsoper and perfomances of Tosca in Zürich. More information at jonaskaufmann.com. / Jonas Kaufmann records exclusively for Sony Classical

Jochen Rieder is a regular guest in many of the world's leading opera houses and concert halls. He collaborates with some of the greatest singers of our time, such as Peter Seiffert, Waltraud Meier, Leo Nucci, Agnes Baltsa, Renée Fleming and Nina Stemme. Over the years, a long and intense musical partnership has been established with the tenor Jonas Kaufmann and together they have performed all over the world. Recordings they have made together, released by Sony, include Operette-Arias (awarded platinum, gold and Echo-Klassik 2015), the Puccini concerto at the Teatro alla Scala in Milan, which has also been shown in cinemas, Dolce Vita – My Italy with the Orchestra Sinfonica Nazionale della RAI di Torino and An Italian Night from the Waldbühne Berlin, which was awarded the OPUS KLASSIK 2019. Other recordings made by Rieder include Mein Wien with Kaufmann and Rachel Willis Sorensen, It’s Christmas with the Mozarteum Orchestra Salzburg, The Sound Of Movies with the Czech National Symphony Orchestra, and a recording of Mahler’s orchestral songs with tenor Peter Mattei and Norrköping Symphony Orchestra. In 2024, the OPUS KLASSIK-awarded recording Breathe with Hera Hyesang Park and the Orchestra del Teatro Carlo Felice was released on Deutsche Grammophon. Jochen Rieder also guest conducts orchestras such as the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, the Orchestra Filarmonica della Scala Milano, the London Philharmonic Orchestra, and the Rundfunk-Sinfonie-Orchester Berlin.

Justyna Jara began playing the violin when she was seven years old. After winning a prize at a competition for young violinists in Gdansk, Poland, she continued her studies in Warsaw with Miroslaw Lawrynowicz. During her studies, she won prizes in several violin competitions. She also recorded Wieniawski's Etudes Caprices Op 10 and 18 for the Acte Préalable record label as a tribute to her teacher. She studied for a year at the Chopin University in Warsaw and then at Juilliard in New York, working with orchestras such as the London Symphony Orchestra, the London Philharmonic Orchestra, the Philharmonia Orchestra and the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, often as assistant concertmaster. In 2014, she was appointed second concertmaster of the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra.

Dawn Sunday Morning Mooonlight Storm Benjamin Britten's opera Peter Grimes, which premiered in 1945, is one of the most central works in British opera of the 20th century. It tells the story of a fisherman who causes the death of his apprentices, is harassed by the small town population and loses his mind. Between the acts, Britten inserted four orchestral interludes that can be performed as a standalone orchestral suite, the Four Sea Interludes. They are titled Dawn, Sunday Morning, Moonlight and Storm. The four interludes depict not only the nature outside the small coastal village where the opera is set, but also the psychological content of the opera and the title character's struggle against society and his inner demons. In Britten's music, the sea is both concrete and symbolic, a force of nature and a mirror for human loneliness, alienation and conflict – something that resonated deeply with him as a homosexual in a time of condemnation. With his sensitive tone language, Britten creates an atmospheric soundscape, and its rich, expansive music is reminiscent of Debussy's La Mer and Mahler's emotional moods. The interludes move between impressionistic colors and sharp drama, and show Britten's mastery in transforming the colors of the sea into expressive music of both beauty and anxiety. Andreas Konvicka

Anders Hillborg wrote his second violin concerto in 2016 for the world-renowned violinist Lisa Batiashvili. The premiere was conducted by Sakari Oramo in Stockholm. “One can guess that Anders Hillborg’s new violin concerto will be a piece that violinist Lisa Bathiashvili will watch over jealously for the next few years,” Svenska Dagbladet wrote in the review. Now, despite the warning, Norwegian Eldbjørg Hemsing has also made the concerto her own, and has recorded it on disc. Hillborg’s violin concerto No. 2 is a dynamic and meditative work that invites the listener on a journey through contrasting soundscapes. There is “ethereal beauty” here, as Hemsing’s album promises, with passages of rhythmic intensity. Anders Hillborg wrote his first violin concerto back in 1992, and it has been performed all over the world. Hillborg himself has described that he lets the soloist be more soloistic in the second, and has definitely raised the bar. “Somewhat furiously difficult,” was the assessment in the review from 2016.

Allegro ma non troppo - Andante molto mosso - Allegro - Allegro - Allegretto Beethoven's Symphony No. 6 in F major is one of his most naturalistic and lyrical works. It was written in parallel with the dramatic Fifth Symphony, and they were premiered at the same time on December 8, 1808 in Vienna. Beethoven himself named the Pastoral Symphony, which reveals a new side of him - the thoughtful, naturalistic and soulful. Together with the Fifth Symphony, it marks a new, more narrative and emotional stage in his work. With its five movements and descriptive titles such as “Awakening of Joyful Feelings on Arrival in the Countryside” and “Scene by the Stream”, it differs in character from his other symphonies. Beethoven emphasized in a famous quote that the work should not be seen as an exact nature painting, but as an expression of the feelings that nature arouses. The thunderstorm of the fourth movement with swirling strings, drums and winds is particularly famous, and illustrates the dramatic forces of nature. The last movement is the shepherd's song with happy and grateful feelings. The symphony reflects Beethoven's strong love for country life and every summer he escaped the noise of the city to seek peace in the countryside. He found inspiration for the work in the village of Nussdorf just north of Vienna, and to this day you can walk along the path that bears his name – Beethovengang. Andreas Konvicka

The Gothenburg Symphony was formed in 1905 and today consists of 109 musicians. The orchestra's base is Gothenburg Concert Hall at Götaplatsen that has gathered music lovers since 1935. Since the 2019-2020 season, Barbara Hannigan is Principal guest conductor. We are also a proud partner of Barbara Hannigan's Equilibrium mentoring program focusing on young singers at the start of their careers. The title Principal Guest Conductor is shared by Pekka Kuusisto from 2025. Wilhelm Stenhammar was the orchestra's chief conductor from 1907 to 1922. He gave the orchestra a strong Nordic profile and invited colleagues Carl Nielsen and Jean Sibelius to the orchestra. Under the direction of conductor Neeme Järvi from 1982-2004, the orchestra made a series of international tours as well as a hundred disc recordings and established themselves among Europe's leading orchestras. In 1996, the Swedish Riksdag appointed the Gothenburg Symphony as Sweden's National Orchestra. In recent decades, the orchestra has had prominent chief conductors such as Santtu-Matias Rouvali, Mario Venzago and Gustavo Dudamel, following Kent Nagano as Principal Guest conductor. Anna-Karin Larsson is CEO and artistic director, Gustavo Dudamel honorary conductor and Neeme Järvi chief conductor emeritus. The orchestra's owner is the Västra Götaland Region. The Gothenburg Symphony works regularly with conductors such as Herbert Blomstedt, Joana Carneiro, Jukka-Pekka Saraste, Christian Zacharias and Anja Bihlmaier.

Dinis Sousa is Music Director of the Royal Northern Sinfonia (RNS) in the UK and Founder and Artistic Director of Orquestra XXI in his native Portugal. In the 2024-2025 season, Sousa led the RNS in programs with Víkingur Ólafsson, Stephen Hough, Benjamin Grosvenor, Pierre-Laurent Aimard and Kristian Bezuidenhout, in Handel's Messiah and much more. In 2023-2024, he conducted an acclaimed Schumann cycle, made a return visit to the BBC Proms and collaborated with soloists such as Christian Tetzlaff, Steven Isserlis and Elisabeth Leonskaja. Dinis Sousa has also been Assistant Conductor of the Monteverdi Choir and Orchestra, where he has been praised for, among other things, a complete Beethoven cycle in London and at the Philharmonie de Paris in 2024. In 2023, he enjoyed success with Berlioz's Les Troyens at the Salzburg Festival, Berlin Musikfest and BBC Proms, where The Guardian noted that " Sousa was electrifying in moments of grandeur." In the autumn of 2023, he made his Carnegie Hall debut conducting the Monteverdi Choir and English Baroque Soloists in two programs of Bach and Handel. As a guest conductor, Sousa has appeared with the Concertgebouw Orchestra, the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra, the BBC Symphony Orchestra, Royal Danish Philharmonic, Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra, Royal Copenhagen Orchestra and the Orchestre Symphonique de Québec. In 2025, he will conduct a new production of Mozart's Così fan tutte for the Graz Opera.

Norwegian violinist Eldbjørg Hemsing is acclaimed for her "breathtaking virtuosity and tenderness" (Expressen, 2024). She has released four award-winning albums and performed world premieres of several compositions. Highlights of the 2025-2026 season include visits at the Elbphilharmonie Hamburg and Concertgebouw Amsterdam and a recording of Bruch’s Violin Concerto with the Oslo Philharmonic. In the 2024-2025 season she appeared with the Taipei Symphony Orchestra and the Hallé Orchestra with Kahchun Wong, with the Orchestra of St. Luke's at David Geffen Hall in New York, with the BBC National Orchestra of Wales and the Bodensee Philharmonie. She returned to the Oslo Philharmonic and the Stavanger Symphony Orchestra, and guested at the Bechstein Hall in London, the Dvorák Prague Festival and the Schwetzinger Festspiele. She has been acclaimed for her performance of Anders Hillborg's Violin Concerto No. 2 with the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra and Esa-Pekka Salonen, which she also released on CD in 2024. Other highlights in recent years include Rolf Wallin's Virvel with the Stavanger Symphony Orchestra and collaborations with the Philharmonia and Santtu-Matias Rouvali. Eldbjørg Hemsing regularly guest performs with orchestras such as the Bergen Philharmonic, the Belgian National Orchestra, the MDR Sinfonieorchester Leipzig and the Shanghai and Hong Kong Philharmonic Orchestras. She has performed at several major events, including the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony, the Shanghai Expo and the UN Security Council. She has developed a close collaboration with composer Tan Dun, and has premiered, toured and recorded several of his award-winning works. Eldbjørg Hemsing was born in Valdres, Norway, and studied at the Barratt Due Music Institute. She plays a 1707 Antonio Stradivarius 'Rivaz, Baron Gutmann' violin, on loan from the Dextra Musica Foundation.

Dawn Sunday Morning Mooonlight Storm Benjamin Britten's opera Peter Grimes, which premiered in 1945, is one of the most central works in British opera of the 20th century. It tells the story of a fisherman who causes the death of his apprentices, is harassed by the small town population and loses his mind. Between the acts, Britten inserted four orchestral interludes that can be performed as a standalone orchestral suite, the Four Sea Interludes. They are titled Dawn, Sunday Morning, Moonlight and Storm. The four interludes depict not only the nature outside the small coastal village where the opera is set, but also the psychological content of the opera and the title character's struggle against society and his inner demons. In Britten's music, the sea is both concrete and symbolic, a force of nature and a mirror for human loneliness, alienation and conflict – something that resonated deeply with him as a homosexual in a time of condemnation. With his sensitive tone language, Britten creates an atmospheric soundscape, and its rich, expansive music is reminiscent of Debussy's La Mer and Mahler's emotional moods. The interludes move between impressionistic colors and sharp drama, and show Britten's mastery in transforming the colors of the sea into expressive music of both beauty and anxiety. Andreas Konvicka

Anders Hillborg wrote his second violin concerto in 2016 for the world-renowned violinist Lisa Batiashvili. The premiere was conducted by Sakari Oramo in Stockholm. “One can guess that Anders Hillborg’s new violin concerto will be a piece that violinist Lisa Bathiashvili will watch over jealously for the next few years,” Svenska Dagbladet wrote in the review. Now, despite the warning, Norwegian Eldbjørg Hemsing has also made the concerto her own, and has recorded it on disc. Hillborg’s violin concerto No. 2 is a dynamic and meditative work that invites the listener on a journey through contrasting soundscapes. There is “ethereal beauty” here, as Hemsing’s album promises, with passages of rhythmic intensity. Anders Hillborg wrote his first violin concerto back in 1992, and it has been performed all over the world. Hillborg himself has described that he lets the soloist be more soloistic in the second, and has definitely raised the bar. “Somewhat furiously difficult,” was the assessment in the review from 2016.

Allegro ma non troppo - Andante molto mosso - Allegro - Allegro - Allegretto Beethoven's Symphony No. 6 in F major is one of his most naturalistic and lyrical works. It was written in parallel with the dramatic Fifth Symphony, and they were premiered at the same time on December 8, 1808 in Vienna. Beethoven himself named the Pastoral Symphony, which reveals a new side of him - the thoughtful, naturalistic and soulful. Together with the Fifth Symphony, it marks a new, more narrative and emotional stage in his work. With its five movements and descriptive titles such as “Awakening of Joyful Feelings on Arrival in the Countryside” and “Scene by the Stream”, it differs in character from his other symphonies. Beethoven emphasized in a famous quote that the work should not be seen as an exact nature painting, but as an expression of the feelings that nature arouses. The thunderstorm of the fourth movement with swirling strings, drums and winds is particularly famous, and illustrates the dramatic forces of nature. The last movement is the shepherd's song with happy and grateful feelings. The symphony reflects Beethoven's strong love for country life and every summer he escaped the noise of the city to seek peace in the countryside. He found inspiration for the work in the village of Nussdorf just north of Vienna, and to this day you can walk along the path that bears his name – Beethovengang. Andreas Konvicka

The Gothenburg Symphony was formed in 1905 and today consists of 109 musicians. The orchestra's base is Gothenburg Concert Hall at Götaplatsen that has gathered music lovers since 1935. Since the 2019-2020 season, Barbara Hannigan is Principal guest conductor. We are also a proud partner of Barbara Hannigan's Equilibrium mentoring program focusing on young singers at the start of their careers. The title Principal Guest Conductor is shared by Pekka Kuusisto from 2025. Wilhelm Stenhammar was the orchestra's chief conductor from 1907 to 1922. He gave the orchestra a strong Nordic profile and invited colleagues Carl Nielsen and Jean Sibelius to the orchestra. Under the direction of conductor Neeme Järvi from 1982-2004, the orchestra made a series of international tours as well as a hundred disc recordings and established themselves among Europe's leading orchestras. In 1996, the Swedish Riksdag appointed the Gothenburg Symphony as Sweden's National Orchestra. In recent decades, the orchestra has had prominent chief conductors such as Santtu-Matias Rouvali, Mario Venzago and Gustavo Dudamel, following Kent Nagano as Principal Guest conductor. Anna-Karin Larsson is CEO and artistic director, Gustavo Dudamel honorary conductor and Neeme Järvi chief conductor emeritus. The orchestra's owner is the Västra Götaland Region. The Gothenburg Symphony works regularly with conductors such as Herbert Blomstedt, Joana Carneiro, Jukka-Pekka Saraste, Christian Zacharias and Anja Bihlmaier.

Dinis Sousa is Music Director of the Royal Northern Sinfonia (RNS) in the UK and Founder and Artistic Director of Orquestra XXI in his native Portugal. In the 2024-2025 season, Sousa led the RNS in programs with Víkingur Ólafsson, Stephen Hough, Benjamin Grosvenor, Pierre-Laurent Aimard and Kristian Bezuidenhout, in Handel's Messiah and much more. In 2023-2024, he conducted an acclaimed Schumann cycle, made a return visit to the BBC Proms and collaborated with soloists such as Christian Tetzlaff, Steven Isserlis and Elisabeth Leonskaja. Dinis Sousa has also been Assistant Conductor of the Monteverdi Choir and Orchestra, where he has been praised for, among other things, a complete Beethoven cycle in London and at the Philharmonie de Paris in 2024. In 2023, he enjoyed success with Berlioz's Les Troyens at the Salzburg Festival, Berlin Musikfest and BBC Proms, where The Guardian noted that " Sousa was electrifying in moments of grandeur." In the autumn of 2023, he made his Carnegie Hall debut conducting the Monteverdi Choir and English Baroque Soloists in two programs of Bach and Handel. As a guest conductor, Sousa has appeared with the Concertgebouw Orchestra, the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra, the BBC Symphony Orchestra, Royal Danish Philharmonic, Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra, Royal Copenhagen Orchestra and the Orchestre Symphonique de Québec. In 2025, he will conduct a new production of Mozart's Così fan tutte for the Graz Opera.

Norwegian violinist Eldbjørg Hemsing is acclaimed for her "breathtaking virtuosity and tenderness" (Expressen, 2024). She has released four award-winning albums and performed world premieres of several compositions. Highlights of the 2025-2026 season include visits at the Elbphilharmonie Hamburg and Concertgebouw Amsterdam and a recording of Bruch’s Violin Concerto with the Oslo Philharmonic. In the 2024-2025 season she appeared with the Taipei Symphony Orchestra and the Hallé Orchestra with Kahchun Wong, with the Orchestra of St. Luke's at David Geffen Hall in New York, with the BBC National Orchestra of Wales and the Bodensee Philharmonie. She returned to the Oslo Philharmonic and the Stavanger Symphony Orchestra, and guested at the Bechstein Hall in London, the Dvorák Prague Festival and the Schwetzinger Festspiele. She has been acclaimed for her performance of Anders Hillborg's Violin Concerto No. 2 with the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra and Esa-Pekka Salonen, which she also released on CD in 2024. Other highlights in recent years include Rolf Wallin's Virvel with the Stavanger Symphony Orchestra and collaborations with the Philharmonia and Santtu-Matias Rouvali. Eldbjørg Hemsing regularly guest performs with orchestras such as the Bergen Philharmonic, the Belgian National Orchestra, the MDR Sinfonieorchester Leipzig and the Shanghai and Hong Kong Philharmonic Orchestras. She has performed at several major events, including the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony, the Shanghai Expo and the UN Security Council. She has developed a close collaboration with composer Tan Dun, and has premiered, toured and recorded several of his award-winning works. Eldbjørg Hemsing was born in Valdres, Norway, and studied at the Barratt Due Music Institute. She plays a 1707 Antonio Stradivarius 'Rivaz, Baron Gutmann' violin, on loan from the Dextra Musica Foundation.

Theme from Battlefield 1942 (© Joel Eriksson / Geek Music) Denez Prigent, Lisa Gerrard: Gortoz a Ran from Black Hawk Down Patrick Doyle: Hogwarts’ Hymn from Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire

Koji Kondo: Legend of Zelda, suite Koji Kondo: Lost Woods from Zelda Sweden, from Minecraft (© C418) Hans Zimmer, Lorne Balfe: Code of Conduct from Call of Duty

Bear McReary: God of War John Williams: Hedwig´s Theme from Harry Potter Johan Söderquist, Patrik Andrén: Battlefield One James Horner: Hymn to the Sea from Titanic Hans Zimmer: Chevaliers de Sangreal from The Da Vinci Code

Chume, Chum Geselle Min Uf dem Anger: Tanz Cour d'Amors: Dulcissime Cour d'Amors: In trutina Blanzeflor et Helena Fortuna imperatrix mundi Carmina Burana was composed in 1935-1936 for choir and orchestra, and the music was unlike anything else. It seemed original and stood outside the trends and schools of its time. The scenography was of a medieval type where suggestive paintings and decorations in interaction with the large choir give an overwhelming impression. Carl Orff's musical inspiration can be said to have its roots in the dramatic pictorial, with Greek tragedy and Italian baroque opera as two major sources of inspiration. Here the work has been transformed into a masterclass organ piece in three parts.

Toccata V Gothic Garden Saga III Epilogue Gunnar Idenstam's largest composition consists of a total of 19 movements and was recorded in 2020. He worked on the composition for six years. They are virtuoso and meditative pieces for large symphonic organ, where each piece is associated with an angel in a Gothic fantasy landscape. The musical language is influenced by both the French cathedral tradition from the mid-20th century and symphonic rock. It reflects our time – a time where we have to deal with conflict, war and the climate crisis. “Strongly personal, and that is the most important thing,” DN wrote in the review.

Gunnar Idenstam is a concert organist, composer and folk musician, known worldwide for his virtuoso playing, his breakneck improvisations and his innovative attitude to organ art. He builds bridges between the French cathedral music tradition, symphonic rock and folk music. He also arranges large orchestral works for organ, such as Ravel's La Valse and Debussy's La Mer, where he succeeds in transferring the timbre of the orchestra to that of the organ. As a folk musician, he is unique in his way of transferring the idiom of traditional Swedish folk music to the organ. With violinist Lisa Rydberg he has released the records Bach in Swedish (2007) and Bach in Swedish: Tyska klockorna (2014). With Johan Hedin, nyckelharpa, he has made the records LÅTAR and LÅTAR II with Swedish folk music. He also collaborates with the musicians Christian Lindberg (trombone), Anders Paulsson (soprano saxophone) and Benny Andersson as well as the dancer and choreographer Virpi Pahkinen. Since 1986 he is an active international concert organist and has performed in Auditorio Nacional in Madrid, the Cathedral in Monaco, St Eustache in Paris, Kölner Philharmonie Konsertsaal, Concert Hall Ivan Cankar in Ljubljana and Spivey Hall in Atlanta, USA. In 2012 he was awarded the Swedish Royal Academy of Music's Great Interpreter Award.

Cecilia Damström (f 1988) Nixus Cecilia Damström from Helsinki has written commissioned works for various ensembles and festivals since 2014. Her compositions have been awarded several national and international composition prizes. Extinctions, commissioned by the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra, was nominated for the Nordic Council Music Prize 2024. About Nixus from 2021 she says: “The Latin word “nixus” can translate as effort, pressure or strain. Nixus is dedicated to anyone who suffers from mental illness in any form. In this work, I try to illustrate how thoughts jump back and forth at a rapid pace, and often form a kind of hamster wheel, a vicious circle from which it is difficult to break out. I try to describe how the thoughts often lead to very gloomy moods and anxiety, which can even become physical manifestations in the body, like palpitations and pressure in the chest.” The work was premiered in February 2021 by the Joensuu City Orchestra under the direction of chief conductor Eero Lehtimäki.

Aaron Copland (1900-1990) Appalachian Spring, suite Copland was a child of the new century, and would come to embody the new era's hopes for the American way of life - not least through the cowboy ballets Rodeo and Billy the Kid. His career was long and rich. He was one of Leonard Bernstein's favorite composers. In the 1920s, he had been a student of the legendary Nadia Boulanger in Paris, and then quickly came under the wing of the conductor Koussevitsky. It was for his Boston Symphony Orchestra that he early composed some of his most brilliant works. Although Copland composed in most genres, he has been most noted for his colorful, rhythmically vital and magnificent orchestral music. The art of ballet particularly interested him and in 1943-1944 he composed Appalachian Spring for Martha Graham's ballet group. She premiered it in October 1944. The orchestral theater in the Library of Congress theater in Washington DC is very small, accommodating only an ensemble of 13 musicians, and for such an ensemble the ballet was also composed. But in the spring of 1945, the composer arranged a shortened version of the ballet for symphony orchestra, something that turned out to be his most performed work. It was Martha Graham who chose the title for the ballet, and she took it from a poem by Hart Crane, which really had nothing to do with the plot. The ballet tells the story of a settler community in Pennsylvania at the turn of the last century. In the slow introduction, we get to know the main characters: the settler woman with a habit of moving in the wilderness, the preacher, the young foreman and his fiancée, as well as a group of four women in the preacher's entourage - all participating in the dance. A quiet prayer takes place and then a love duet. The preacher leads a new dance which reveals his Irish background, and several of the people take up their own dances until the preacher blesses the young couple with a new prayer - and here Copland has also included the old salvation tune The Gift to be Simple. The ballet ends with the young couple left alone and strengthened in their new house. Stig Jacobsson

Felix Mendelssohn (1809-1847) Symphony No. 5, Reformation Symphony No. 5 was written in 1831 and was on the verge of not having a premiere at all. The Paris Conservatoire orchestra did not think it was melodious enough and refused to play it. Mendelssohn also called it "a complete misfit". Instead, it premiered in Berlin the following year. The symphony was written to commemorate the Reformation and the first movement is based on the hymn Dresden Amen. Wagner would use the same melody in Parsifal. The second movement is a lively scherzo, while the third movement, marked Andante and in G minor, is mainly for the strings. The finale also quotes a hymn, the well-known Our God is a mighty fortress to us. At the end of the intense coda, Mendelssohn offers a final, loud variation of the chorale in which the entire orchestra joins in.

Finnish conductor Maria Itkonen has established herself as a versatile conductor, both in opera and orchestral repertoire. Highlights of the past season included debuts at the Teatro de la Maestranza in Seville and the Auditorium-Orchestre National de Lyon, with the Helsingborg Symphony Orchestra and the Ostrobothnian Chamber Orchestra. Itkonen has conducted the Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra, the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra, the Tampere Philharmonic Orchestra, the Malmö Symphony Orchestra and the Turku Philharmonic Orchestra. She made her debut at the Stockholm Folk Opera in 2022 with Norma and has premiered several works by contemporary Finnish composers. Maria Itkonen studied conducting with Professor Jorma Panula in Finland and at the Royal Academy of Music in Stockholm. Before focusing on conducting, she had a career as concertmaster in leading European orchestras.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791) Eine kleine Nachtmusik Allegro Romanze: Andante Menuetto e Trio Rondo: Allegro One might wonder if there is a more beautifully crafted and polished gem than Eine kleine Nachtmusik - so appealing, so perfect. Nachtmusik is German for "serenade", and when it was composed, Mozart had already composed twelve serenades. Compared to the earlier serenades, it truly lives up to its name - a little one. It becomes a miniature, a simple, classically pure and easily accessible trifle, in terms of scope. The earlier serenades could be 45 minutes long. A serenade should also be intended to be played outdoors, but that does not work at all with Eine kleine Nachtmusik with its lovely and intimate string music. Mozart included Eine kleine Nachtmusik in his own catalogue of compositions in Vienna on August 10, 1787, and listed it as having five movements. There was another minuet - but this movement disappeared early in the work's history and has never been found. It has also not been possible to find out why Mozart wrote this lovely entertainment music. In any case, it does not seem to have been a commission, but that he wrote music out of his own interest. It has been surprising that the mature master of cosmopolitan Vienna interrupted the demanding work of orchestrating the exciting nighttime moods of the opera Don Giovanni in favor of this delicacy. Was it the contrast he needed? Was the inspiration pressing?

Lille Bror Söderlundh (1912-1957) Oboe Concertino Lille Bror Söderlundh was a composer, singer-songwriter, conductor at various theaters in Stockholm from 1936 to 1941, and a choir conductor in Leksand and Borlänge. He became known for his songs to texts by Nils Ferlin, published in collections such as När skönheten kom till byn, Prästkrage and Sorgmantel. He also composed children's operas, chamber music, choral and instrumental music, and was strongly influenced by folk music. The Concertino for oboe and string orchestra was written in 1944 and dedicated to the oboist Rolf Lännerholm. It was premiered at a concert that Söderlundh had arranged himself in the Grünewald Hall with his songs and newer compositions. Unfortunately, the reception was skeptical, to say the least. It was not until the 1950s that Söderlundh had his breakthrough as a composer, primarily with his violin concerto from 1954.

Robert Schumann (1810-1856) Abendlied (string orchestra, arr. Svendsen) Abendlied, ‘evening song’, was originally a piano piece. Robert Schumann composed it in 1849 for his collection of 12 piano pieces “for small and large children” (Op 85). In 1872, the Norwegian composer Johan Svendsen wrote this arrangement for string orchestra, one of many he made of Schumann’s rich piano music. The most extensive Schumann arrangement dates from the summer of 1866, when Svendsen orchestrated Faschingsschwank aus Wien, Op 26, for large orchestra.

Franz Schubert (1797-1828) Symphony No. 5 D. 485 No great composer received as little international attention during his lifetime as Schubert. When he died, aged 31, he was practically unknown outside Vienna, and in Vienna he was best known for his songs. Schubert's vocal singing style is also found in his instrumental compositions. Franz Schubert's Fifth Symphony, without trumpets and timpani, is a youthful masterpiece – written when he was 19. The work carries a lightness, elegance and luminosity. Mozart had been dead for 25 years and his music was more popular than ever. For a young composer, Mozart was the model to emulate. Symphony No. 5 is a chamber symphonic gem in which every instrument is allowed to breathe. Parts of the melody echo in the lower instruments as accompaniment, a technique that can be heard throughout the symphony's four movements. The opening Allegro movement bubbles with energy, and the finale after the minuet sparkles with playful brilliance. The slow second movement is perhaps the most original. The singable melodies (cantilenas) carry an operatic calm. The duet between violins and woodwinds has a dreamy sharpness. A couple of months before the work was completed (1816), Schubert wrote in his diary: "O Mozart, immortal Mozart! What countless impressions, of a brighter and better life, you have stamped on our souls."

The Gothenburg Symphony was formed in 1905 and today consists of 109 musicians. The orchestra's base is Gothenburg Concert Hall at Götaplatsen that has gathered music lovers since 1935. Since the 2019-2020 season, Barbara Hannigan is Principal guest conductor. We are also a proud partner of Barbara Hannigan's Equilibrium mentoring program focusing on young singers at the start of their careers. The title Principal Guest Conductor is shared by Pekka Kuusisto from 2025. Wilhelm Stenhammar was the orchestra's chief conductor from 1907 to 1922. He gave the orchestra a strong Nordic profile and invited colleagues Carl Nielsen and Jean Sibelius to the orchestra. Under the direction of conductor Neeme Järvi from 1982-2004, the orchestra made a series of international tours as well as a hundred disc recordings and established themselves among Europe's leading orchestras. In 1996, the Swedish Riksdag appointed the Gothenburg Symphony as Sweden's National Orchestra. In recent decades, the orchestra has had prominent chief conductors such as Santtu-Matias Rouvali, Mario Venzago and Gustavo Dudamel, following Kent Nagano as Principal Guest conductor. Anna-Karin Larsson is CEO and artistic director, Gustavo Dudamel honorary conductor and Neeme Järvi chief conductor emeritus. The orchestra's owner is the Västra Götaland Region. The Gothenburg Symphony works regularly with conductors such as Herbert Blomstedt, Joana Carneiro, Jukka-Pekka Saraste, Christian Zacharias and Anja Bihlmaier.

Sara Trobäck has been Principal concertmaster of the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra since 2002. She studied with Tibor Fülep at the Gothenburg Academy of Music and with György Pauk at the Royal Academy of Music in London. In connection with her graduation concert in 2001, she received the academy's prestigious Professional Diploma and the Dove Award. Sara Trobäck has also participated in master classes with Lord Yehudi Menuhin, Ruggiero Ricci and Joshua Bell. As a soloist, she has appeared with the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra, the Swedish Chamber Orchestra, the Stockholm Sinfonietta and the Helsingborg Symphony Orchestra, among others. In 2010, she premiered a violin concerto by Johannes Jansson dedicated to her and the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra. Her London debut took place in the summer of 1999 when she performed Tchaikovsky's Violin Concerto with the London Soloists in St Martin-in-the-Fields. Sara Trobäck has also given concerts in Scotland, Germany, France, Spain, Portugal and China. In 2002 she formed Trio Poseidon together with solo cellist Claes Gunnarsson and pianist Per Lundberg. The trio has among other things recorded Beethoven's Triple Concerto. Sara Trobäck plays a Giovanni Battista Guadagnini on loan from the Järnåker Foundation.

Mårten Larsson was born in Örebro and trained at the Royal Academy of Music under Alf Nilsson. He has been a leading oboist in Sweden for many years and is solo oboist in the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra. He has also been a member of the Stockholm Sinfonietta. Mårten Larsson teaches at the Gothenburg Academy of Music and Drama and has released albums with music by Johan Helmich Roman, JS Bach and Keith Jarrett, among others.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791) Eine kleine Nachtmusik Allegro Romanze: Andante Menuetto e Trio Rondo: Allegro One might wonder if there is a more beautifully crafted and polished gem than Eine kleine Nachtmusik - so appealing, so perfect. Nachtmusik is German for "serenade", and when it was composed, Mozart had already composed twelve serenades. Compared to the earlier serenades, it truly lives up to its name - a little one. It becomes a miniature, a simple, classically pure and easily accessible trifle, in terms of scope. The earlier serenades could be 45 minutes long. A serenade should also be intended to be played outdoors, but that does not work at all with Eine kleine Nachtmusik with its lovely and intimate string music. Mozart included Eine kleine Nachtmusik in his own catalogue of compositions in Vienna on August 10, 1787, and listed it as having five movements. There was another minuet - but this movement disappeared early in the work's history and has never been found. It has also not been possible to find out why Mozart wrote this lovely entertainment music. In any case, it does not seem to have been a commission, but that he wrote music out of his own interest. It has been surprising that the mature master of cosmopolitan Vienna interrupted the demanding work of orchestrating the exciting nighttime moods of the opera Don Giovanni in favor of this delicacy. Was it the contrast he needed? Was the inspiration pressing?

Lille Bror Söderlundh (1912-1957) Oboe Concertino Lille Bror Söderlundh was a composer, singer-songwriter, conductor at various theaters in Stockholm from 1936 to 1941, and a choir conductor in Leksand and Borlänge. He became known for his songs to texts by Nils Ferlin, published in collections such as När skönheten kom till byn, Prästkrage and Sorgmantel. He also composed children's operas, chamber music, choral and instrumental music, and was strongly influenced by folk music. The Concertino for oboe and string orchestra was written in 1944 and dedicated to the oboist Rolf Lännerholm. It was premiered at a concert that Söderlundh had arranged himself in the Grünewald Hall with his songs and newer compositions. Unfortunately, the reception was skeptical, to say the least. It was not until the 1950s that Söderlundh had his breakthrough as a composer, primarily with his violin concerto from 1954.

Robert Schumann (1810-1856) Abendlied (string orchestra, arr. Svendsen) Abendlied, ‘evening song’, was originally a piano piece. Robert Schumann composed it in 1849 for his collection of 12 piano pieces “for small and large children” (Op 85). In 1872, the Norwegian composer Johan Svendsen wrote this arrangement for string orchestra, one of many he made of Schumann’s rich piano music. The most extensive Schumann arrangement dates from the summer of 1866, when Svendsen orchestrated Faschingsschwank aus Wien, Op 26, for large orchestra.

Franz Schubert (1797-1828) Symphony No. 5 D. 485 No great composer received as little international attention during his lifetime as Schubert. When he died, aged 31, he was practically unknown outside Vienna, and in Vienna he was best known for his songs. Schubert's vocal singing style is also found in his instrumental compositions. Franz Schubert's Fifth Symphony, without trumpets and timpani, is a youthful masterpiece – written when he was 19. The work carries a lightness, elegance and luminosity. Mozart had been dead for 25 years and his music was more popular than ever. For a young composer, Mozart was the model to emulate. Symphony No. 5 is a chamber symphonic gem in which every instrument is allowed to breathe. Parts of the melody echo in the lower instruments as accompaniment, a technique that can be heard throughout the symphony's four movements. The opening Allegro movement bubbles with energy, and the finale after the minuet sparkles with playful brilliance. The slow second movement is perhaps the most original. The singable melodies (cantilenas) carry an operatic calm. The duet between violins and woodwinds has a dreamy sharpness. A couple of months before the work was completed (1816), Schubert wrote in his diary: "O Mozart, immortal Mozart! What countless impressions, of a brighter and better life, you have stamped on our souls."

The Gothenburg Symphony was formed in 1905 and today consists of 109 musicians. The orchestra's base is Gothenburg Concert Hall at Götaplatsen that has gathered music lovers since 1935. Since the 2019-2020 season, Barbara Hannigan is Principal guest conductor. We are also a proud partner of Barbara Hannigan's Equilibrium mentoring program focusing on young singers at the start of their careers. The title Principal Guest Conductor is shared by Pekka Kuusisto from 2025. Wilhelm Stenhammar was the orchestra's chief conductor from 1907 to 1922. He gave the orchestra a strong Nordic profile and invited colleagues Carl Nielsen and Jean Sibelius to the orchestra. Under the direction of conductor Neeme Järvi from 1982-2004, the orchestra made a series of international tours as well as a hundred disc recordings and established themselves among Europe's leading orchestras. In 1996, the Swedish Riksdag appointed the Gothenburg Symphony as Sweden's National Orchestra. In recent decades, the orchestra has had prominent chief conductors such as Santtu-Matias Rouvali, Mario Venzago and Gustavo Dudamel, following Kent Nagano as Principal Guest conductor. Anna-Karin Larsson is CEO and artistic director, Gustavo Dudamel honorary conductor and Neeme Järvi chief conductor emeritus. The orchestra's owner is the Västra Götaland Region. The Gothenburg Symphony works regularly with conductors such as Herbert Blomstedt, Joana Carneiro, Jukka-Pekka Saraste, Christian Zacharias and Anja Bihlmaier.

Sara Trobäck has been Principal concertmaster of the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra since 2002. She studied with Tibor Fülep at the Gothenburg Academy of Music and with György Pauk at the Royal Academy of Music in London. In connection with her graduation concert in 2001, she received the academy's prestigious Professional Diploma and the Dove Award. Sara Trobäck has also participated in master classes with Lord Yehudi Menuhin, Ruggiero Ricci and Joshua Bell. As a soloist, she has appeared with the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra, the Swedish Chamber Orchestra, the Stockholm Sinfonietta and the Helsingborg Symphony Orchestra, among others. In 2010, she premiered a violin concerto by Johannes Jansson dedicated to her and the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra. Her London debut took place in the summer of 1999 when she performed Tchaikovsky's Violin Concerto with the London Soloists in St Martin-in-the-Fields. Sara Trobäck has also given concerts in Scotland, Germany, France, Spain, Portugal and China. In 2002 she formed Trio Poseidon together with solo cellist Claes Gunnarsson and pianist Per Lundberg. The trio has among other things recorded Beethoven's Triple Concerto. Sara Trobäck plays a Giovanni Battista Guadagnini on loan from the Järnåker Foundation.

Mårten Larsson was born in Örebro and trained at the Royal Academy of Music under Alf Nilsson. He has been a leading oboist in Sweden for many years and is solo oboist in the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra. He has also been a member of the Stockholm Sinfonietta. Mårten Larsson teaches at the Gothenburg Academy of Music and Drama and has released albums with music by Johan Helmich Roman, JS Bach and Keith Jarrett, among others.

Wilhelm Stenhammar (1871-1927) Excelsior! Many have said that Stenhammar's Excelsior! is strongly influenced by Wagner, but there is undeniably much here that would prove to be genuine Stenhammar. The title can be interpreted as "rushing and striving", and the lecture description of the main theme is "passionately agitated". The score is dated Berlin 4 September 1896. It is known that Stenhammar saw a performance of Goethe's Faust in the German capital at this time and that he had purchased Goethe's collected works. The books have been preserved and it can be seen that the volume with Faust was read extensively. Although he clearly had Faust as a literary model, the drama has only helped to create the atmosphere. If any part of Faust has been the direct inspiration, it is the conversation between Faust and his valet Wagner immediately after the parts Prologue in Heaven and Night. The overture was dedicated to the Berlin Philharmonic, which may seem presumptuous for a 25-year-old composer who had written his very first orchestral work. When Stenhammar himself brought the work to his debut concert as conductor with the Royal Court Orchestra in Stockholm on 16 October 1897, it was a great success.

Camille Saint-Saëns (1835–1921) Cello Concerto No. 1 Like Mozart and Mendelssohn, Camille Saint-Saëns was a precocious child prodigy. By the age of 10, he could play all of Beethoven's piano sonatas from memory. During his long life, he composed in most genres: symphonies, chamber music, opera and choral works. He is perhaps best known for Carnival of the Animals and Cello Concerto No. 1 – called "the perfect cello concerto" by Shostakovich. No frills. No long orchestral introduction. With a dramatic orchestral chord followed by the soloist's fiery entrance, the listener is thrown straight into a musical whirlwind – as if the cello had suddenly acquired a voice that could no longer be contained. Through the concerto's three movements, Saint-Saëns lets the cello show its full range: from lyrical warmth to virtuoso brilliance, from glowing temperament to heartfelt reflection. The music demands total presence from both soloist and audience. There is certainly time for rest and recovery, but absolutely no break – the three movements are composed in one long, continuous flow. The sudden attack of the opening retains its romantic shock effect until the final triumphant gathering of power. The premiere of the cello concerto took place in Paris in 1873 – since then considered by many to be one of the greatest.

Jean Sibelius (1865-1957) Symphony No. 6 Op 104 Allegro molto moderato Allegretto moderato Poco vivace Allegro molto As early as 1915, Sibelius had begun work on what would become the Sixth and Seventh Symphonies, but it was not an easy journey. In February 1920, work on the Sixth Symphony seems to have come to a halt. He writes in his diary: "I am getting older and youth brings new ideals and interests people in them. Shall the evening of my life find me listless and resigned, quietly awaiting death?" His question seems frighteningly prophetic. After the Seventh Symphony and Tapiola (1926), a 30-year musical silence awaited the Finn in Ainola. It was fundamentally about being true to himself, and Sibelius found that his voice was no longer relevant. But in the 1920s, a lively glow still remained. The Fifth Symphony was a success in the United States (with Stokowski in Philadelphia and Stransky in New York). Sibelius also received a well-paid offer to become a teacher at the prestigious Eastman-Rochester School, but after many turns he turned it down: "To leave composing now would be suicide." In the autumn of 1922, work on the Sixth Symphony gained new momentum and by January 1923 most of it was finished. The premiere took place in Helsinki on 19 February 1923. Just a week later, the symphony received its Swedish premiere in Stockholm, and on 10 April Sibelius took the symphony to Gothenburg. Julius Rabe wrote in Göteborgs Handels och Sjöfartstidning: "Yesterday's Sibelius concert was without a doubt the greatest day of this now-passing musical year. It had both a powerful inner significance and an outer festivity. And there was in the audience a willingness to receive and let themselves be carried away, which gives a concert such an invaluable addition of atmosphere and resonance, which welds together the thousand-strong crowd of the public into a humbly listening congregation, where the individuals disappear and merge into a collective personality."

Hugo Alfvén (1872-1960) Suite from The Prodigal Son With a music that can be said to be characterized by the musical aftermath of Romanticism, the composer and conductor Hugo Alfvén left his mark on Swedish musical life during the first half of the 20th century. The ballet The Prodigal Son, or more precisely: the orchestral suite from it, would become Alfvén's last major composition. The ballet depicts the biblical story of the son who leaves his father, squanders his inheritance, but who then returns in repentance and through reconciliation is given a picture of what is genuinely human. The music can be said to reflect this inner journey – we travel from the lyrical to the dramatic. From the youthful to the thoughtful of age. In between we hear evidence of Alfvén's soft spot for folk melody and the rhythmic danceable. Several of the melodies are also found in the many songs that Alfvén had arranged and composed for choir Orphei Drängar, which he over many years turned into the notorious male choir it still is today.

The Gothenburg Symphony was formed in 1905 and today consists of 109 musicians. The orchestra's base is Gothenburg Concert Hall at Götaplatsen that has gathered music lovers since 1935. Since the 2019-2020 season, Barbara Hannigan is Principal guest conductor. We are also a proud partner of Barbara Hannigan's Equilibrium mentoring program focusing on young singers at the start of their careers. The title Principal Guest Conductor is shared by Pekka Kuusisto from 2025. Wilhelm Stenhammar was the orchestra's chief conductor from 1907 to 1922. He gave the orchestra a strong Nordic profile and invited colleagues Carl Nielsen and Jean Sibelius to the orchestra. Under the direction of conductor Neeme Järvi from 1982-2004, the orchestra made a series of international tours as well as a hundred disc recordings and established themselves among Europe's leading orchestras. In 1996, the Swedish Riksdag appointed the Gothenburg Symphony as Sweden's National Orchestra. In recent decades, the orchestra has had prominent chief conductors such as Santtu-Matias Rouvali, Mario Venzago and Gustavo Dudamel, following Kent Nagano as Principal Guest conductor. Anna-Karin Larsson is CEO and artistic director, Gustavo Dudamel honorary conductor and Neeme Järvi chief conductor emeritus. The orchestra's owner is the Västra Götaland Region. The Gothenburg Symphony works regularly with conductors such as Herbert Blomstedt, Joana Carneiro, Jukka-Pekka Saraste, Christian Zacharias and Anja Bihlmaier.

Conductor Laureate of Minnesota Orchestra, where he held the Music Directorship for 19 years, Osmo Vänskä is recognised for his compelling interpretations of repertoire of all ages and an energetic presence on the podium. He was Music Director of Seoul Philharmonic Orchestra from 2020 to 2023 and has long-standing relationships with many orchestras worldwide. With Minnesota Orchestra he undertook five major European tours, as well as an historic trip to Cuba in 2015. They also made a ground-breaking tour to South Africa in 2018 and made an acclaimed return to the BBC Proms the same year. This season he appears with Gothenburg Symphony, Symphonieorchester des Bayerischen Rundfunks, Oslo Philharmonic, Bergen and Helsinki Philharmonic orchestras, Antwerp and Iceland symphonies as well as City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra. He also returns to his long-time partner Minnesota Orchestra and to the Tokyo Metropolitan Symphony Orchestra and Tokyo Symphony Orchestra. Vänskä studied conducting at Finland’s Sibelius Academy and was awarded first prize in the 1982 Besançon Competition. He began his career as a clarinetist, occupying the co-principal chair of Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra.

Truls Mørk is an acclaimed cellist and performs with the most prominent orchestras including the Orchestre de Paris, Berliner Philharmoniker, Vienna Philharmonic, Concertgebouw Orchestra, Munich Philharmonic, Philharmonia and London Philharmonic and Gewandhausorchester Leipzig. In North America, he has appeared with the New York Philharmonic, Philadelphia Orchestra, Cleveland Orchestra, Boston Symphony Orchestra and Los Angeles Philharmonic. Conducting collaborations include Esa-Pekka Salonen, David Zinman, Manfred Honeck, Gustavo Dudamel, Sir Simon Rattle, Kent Nagano, Yannick Nézet-Séguin and Christoph Eschenbach, among others. In the 2024-2025 season, Mørk returned to the Rotterdam, London and Bergen Philharmonic Orchestras, RAI Turin, Orchestre Phiharmonique de Radio France and the ORF Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra. Truls Mørk is a great advocate for contemporary music and has given over 30 world premieres. He has performed Esa-Pekka Salonen's Cello Concerto with a number of prominent orchestras, Victoria Borisova-Olla's Cello Concerto Oh Giselle Remember Me, Rautavaara's Towards the Horizon, Pavel Haas's Cello Concerto with the Vienna Philharmonic and Jonathan Nott, Penderecki's Concerto for Three Cellos with the Hafliði Symphony Orchestra and Charles Hallgrímsson's Cello Concerto commissioned by the Oslo Philharmonic, Iceland Symphony and the Scottish Chamber Orchestra. He last visited the Gothenburg Symphony in season 2016-2017 when he was Artist in Residence.

Wilhelm Stenhammar (1871-1927) Excelsior! Many have said that Stenhammar's Excelsior! is strongly influenced by Wagner, but there is undeniably much here that would prove to be genuine Stenhammar. The title can be interpreted as "rushing and striving", and the lecture description of the main theme is "passionately agitated". The score is dated Berlin 4 September 1896. It is known that Stenhammar saw a performance of Goethe's Faust in the German capital at this time and that he had purchased Goethe's collected works. The books have been preserved and it can be seen that the volume with Faust was read extensively. Although he clearly had Faust as a literary model, the drama has only helped to create the atmosphere. If any part of Faust has been the direct inspiration, it is the conversation between Faust and his valet Wagner immediately after the parts Prologue in Heaven and Night. The overture was dedicated to the Berlin Philharmonic, which may seem presumptuous for a 25-year-old composer who had written his very first orchestral work. When Stenhammar himself brought the work to his debut concert as conductor with the Royal Court Orchestra in Stockholm on 16 October 1897, it was a great success.

Camille Saint-Saëns (1835–1921) Cello Concerto No. 1 Like Mozart and Mendelssohn, Camille Saint-Saëns was a precocious child prodigy. By the age of 10, he could play all of Beethoven's piano sonatas from memory. During his long life, he composed in most genres: symphonies, chamber music, opera and choral works. He is perhaps best known for Carnival of the Animals and Cello Concerto No. 1 – called "the perfect cello concerto" by Shostakovich. No frills. No long orchestral introduction. With a dramatic orchestral chord followed by the soloist's fiery entrance, the listener is thrown straight into a musical whirlwind – as if the cello had suddenly acquired a voice that could no longer be contained. Through the concerto's three movements, Saint-Saëns lets the cello show its full range: from lyrical warmth to virtuoso brilliance, from glowing temperament to heartfelt reflection. The music demands total presence from both soloist and audience. There is certainly time for rest and recovery, but absolutely no break – the three movements are composed in one long, continuous flow. The sudden attack of the opening retains its romantic shock effect until the final triumphant gathering of power. The premiere of the cello concerto took place in Paris in 1873 – since then considered by many to be one of the greatest.

Jean Sibelius (1865-1957) Symphony No. 6 Op 104 Allegro molto moderato Allegretto moderato Poco vivace Allegro molto As early as 1915, Sibelius had begun work on what would become the Sixth and Seventh Symphonies, but it was not an easy journey. In February 1920, work on the Sixth Symphony seems to have come to a halt. He writes in his diary: "I am getting older and youth brings new ideals and interests people in them. Shall the evening of my life find me listless and resigned, quietly awaiting death?" His question seems frighteningly prophetic. After the Seventh Symphony and Tapiola (1926), a 30-year musical silence awaited the Finn in Ainola. It was fundamentally about being true to himself, and Sibelius found that his voice was no longer relevant. But in the 1920s, a lively glow still remained. The Fifth Symphony was a success in the United States (with Stokowski in Philadelphia and Stransky in New York). Sibelius also received a well-paid offer to become a teacher at the prestigious Eastman-Rochester School, but after many turns he turned it down: "To leave composing now would be suicide." In the autumn of 1922, work on the Sixth Symphony gained new momentum and by January 1923 most of it was finished. The premiere took place in Helsinki on 19 February 1923. Just a week later, the symphony received its Swedish premiere in Stockholm, and on 10 April Sibelius took the symphony to Gothenburg. Julius Rabe wrote in Göteborgs Handels och Sjöfartstidning: "Yesterday's Sibelius concert was without a doubt the greatest day of this now-passing musical year. It had both a powerful inner significance and an outer festivity. And there was in the audience a willingness to receive and let themselves be carried away, which gives a concert such an invaluable addition of atmosphere and resonance, which welds together the thousand-strong crowd of the public into a humbly listening congregation, where the individuals disappear and merge into a collective personality."

Hugo Alfvén (1872-1960) Suite from The Prodigal Son With a music that can be said to be characterized by the musical aftermath of Romanticism, the composer and conductor Hugo Alfvén left his mark on Swedish musical life during the first half of the 20th century. The ballet The Prodigal Son, or more precisely: the orchestral suite from it, would become Alfvén's last major composition. The ballet depicts the biblical story of the son who leaves his father, squanders his inheritance, but who then returns in repentance and through reconciliation is given a picture of what is genuinely human. The music can be said to reflect this inner journey – we travel from the lyrical to the dramatic. From the youthful to the thoughtful of age. In between we hear evidence of Alfvén's soft spot for folk melody and the rhythmic danceable. Several of the melodies are also found in the many songs that Alfvén had arranged and composed for choir Orphei Drängar, which he over many years turned into the notorious male choir it still is today.

The Gothenburg Symphony was formed in 1905 and today consists of 109 musicians. The orchestra's base is Gothenburg Concert Hall at Götaplatsen that has gathered music lovers since 1935. Since the 2019-2020 season, Barbara Hannigan is Principal guest conductor. We are also a proud partner of Barbara Hannigan's Equilibrium mentoring program focusing on young singers at the start of their careers. The title Principal Guest Conductor is shared by Pekka Kuusisto from 2025. Wilhelm Stenhammar was the orchestra's chief conductor from 1907 to 1922. He gave the orchestra a strong Nordic profile and invited colleagues Carl Nielsen and Jean Sibelius to the orchestra. Under the direction of conductor Neeme Järvi from 1982-2004, the orchestra made a series of international tours as well as a hundred disc recordings and established themselves among Europe's leading orchestras. In 1996, the Swedish Riksdag appointed the Gothenburg Symphony as Sweden's National Orchestra. In recent decades, the orchestra has had prominent chief conductors such as Santtu-Matias Rouvali, Mario Venzago and Gustavo Dudamel, following Kent Nagano as Principal Guest conductor. Anna-Karin Larsson is CEO and artistic director, Gustavo Dudamel honorary conductor and Neeme Järvi chief conductor emeritus. The orchestra's owner is the Västra Götaland Region. The Gothenburg Symphony works regularly with conductors such as Herbert Blomstedt, Joana Carneiro, Jukka-Pekka Saraste, Christian Zacharias and Anja Bihlmaier.

Conductor Laureate of Minnesota Orchestra, where he held the Music Directorship for 19 years, Osmo Vänskä is recognised for his compelling interpretations of repertoire of all ages and an energetic presence on the podium. He was Music Director of Seoul Philharmonic Orchestra from 2020 to 2023 and has long-standing relationships with many orchestras worldwide. With Minnesota Orchestra he undertook five major European tours, as well as an historic trip to Cuba in 2015. They also made a ground-breaking tour to South Africa in 2018 and made an acclaimed return to the BBC Proms the same year. This season he appears with Gothenburg Symphony, Symphonieorchester des Bayerischen Rundfunks, Oslo Philharmonic, Bergen and Helsinki Philharmonic orchestras, Antwerp and Iceland symphonies as well as City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra. He also returns to his long-time partner Minnesota Orchestra and to the Tokyo Metropolitan Symphony Orchestra and Tokyo Symphony Orchestra. Vänskä studied conducting at Finland’s Sibelius Academy and was awarded first prize in the 1982 Besançon Competition. He began his career as a clarinetist, occupying the co-principal chair of Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra.

Truls Mørk is an acclaimed cellist and performs with the most prominent orchestras including the Orchestre de Paris, Berliner Philharmoniker, Vienna Philharmonic, Concertgebouw Orchestra, Munich Philharmonic, Philharmonia and London Philharmonic and Gewandhausorchester Leipzig. In North America, he has appeared with the New York Philharmonic, Philadelphia Orchestra, Cleveland Orchestra, Boston Symphony Orchestra and Los Angeles Philharmonic. Conducting collaborations include Esa-Pekka Salonen, David Zinman, Manfred Honeck, Gustavo Dudamel, Sir Simon Rattle, Kent Nagano, Yannick Nézet-Séguin and Christoph Eschenbach, among others. In the 2024-2025 season, Mørk returned to the Rotterdam, London and Bergen Philharmonic Orchestras, RAI Turin, Orchestre Phiharmonique de Radio France and the ORF Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra. Truls Mørk is a great advocate for contemporary music and has given over 30 world premieres. He has performed Esa-Pekka Salonen's Cello Concerto with a number of prominent orchestras, Victoria Borisova-Olla's Cello Concerto Oh Giselle Remember Me, Rautavaara's Towards the Horizon, Pavel Haas's Cello Concerto with the Vienna Philharmonic and Jonathan Nott, Penderecki's Concerto for Three Cellos with the Hafliði Symphony Orchestra and Charles Hallgrímsson's Cello Concerto commissioned by the Oslo Philharmonic, Iceland Symphony and the Scottish Chamber Orchestra. He last visited the Gothenburg Symphony in season 2016-2017 when he was Artist in Residence.

Alfred Hollins (1865-1942) Concert Overture No. 1 in C minor The British organist Alfred Hollins, blind from birth, showed exceptional musical talent early on and later, through world-wide tours, became a household name both as an organist and pianist, although few today have heard of him. From 1897 he was organist at St. George’s Church in Edinburgh. At his concerts he showed an unusual pedagogical side for his time when he gave oral comments on the works he played. Among his approximately 50 organ works are three concert overtures, the first of which in C minor was composed in 1885. The work is orchestral and written in an improvisational sonata form where influences from Felix Mendelssohn are noticeable in the energetic main theme while the softer side theme points more towards the popular operetta style of the time. Hollins summarized his life in a 1936 autobiography with the slightly self-deprecating title A blind organist looks back.

Maurice Duruflé (1902-1986) Prélude et Fugue sur le nom d'ALAIN Despite a limited list of works, Maurice Duruflé is considered one of the most important French composers of the first half of the 20th century. Prelude et Fugue sur le nom d’Alain was composed in 1941 in memory of his colleague and friend Jehan Alain, who died in the early stages of World War II. The prelude, whose main theme is based on Alain’s name according to a system created by Duruflé, has a fleeting, virtuoso character with a contrasting theme that is a reversal of the theme in Alain’s famous Litanies from 1937. At the end of the prelude, the entire theme is heard in its correct form at a slow tempo. The fugue is a double fugue where the first theme contains the same notes as the main theme of the prelude while the second consists of continuous 16th-note movements. The two themes are combined early on and the whole thing develops towards the end into a powerful toccata-like tutti. The musical language is modal with impressionistic elements.

Healey Willan (1880-1968) Introduction, Passacaglia and Fugue Healey Willan was born in England but spent most of his life in Toronto, Canada. He wrote music in most genres, but it is his organ music that is played today, especially his monumental Introduction, Passacaglia and Fugue, composed in 1916. The inspiration for the work came from listening to a memorial concert after Max Reger's death, when Reger's great work Op 127 with the same title was played. Willan's work in the dark key of E flat minor is a masterpiece, orchestral inspired, where the composer makes maximum use of all the resources of the great Anglican organ type. The introduction, heavy and ominous, leads improvisationally to the passacaglia, the theme of which is first presented in the pedal. We hear 18 exciting and varied variations on this theme. The lively fugue, whose theme is based on the beginning of the passacaglia theme, develops increasingly in a virtuoso direction before, as a conclusion, the passacaglia theme returns with full force in the pedal.

Marcel Dupré (1886-1971) Cortége et Litanie Cortége et Litanie by Marcel Dupré was originally part of a collection of four pieces for piano. After first being rearranged for organ and orchestra, the work was given its now well-known form for organ solo in 1922. Initially, we hear solemn, chorale-like processional music, which is followed by a second part with a restless sixteenth-note theme that is repeated ostinato-style, an image of a heartfelt prayer that is uttered over and over again. After a suggestive charge, the two parts are combined and the work is rounded off with heavy chord masses that alternate between the two hands in a toccata-style manner and give a vision of church bells.

Franz Liszt (1811-1886) Les Préludes, arr. Nathan Laube Franz Liszt's famous symphonic poem Les Préludes served in an initial version as an overture to a four-movement choral work, Les quatre élémens. In 1853, Liszt revised the work, now as a standalone orchestral piece, and gave it the title we know today after a poem by the French poet Alphonse de Lamartine. However, the fact that it is based on his poem is a post-construction as there is no major difference between the original and the final version. Les Préludes is a magnificent, highly romantic work with striking, majestic themes and effective contrasts that include a central dramatic storm scene followed by a quiet pastoral. Nathan Laube plays the virtuoso work in his own transcription for organ. Les Préludes was, incidentally, one of Alfred Hollin's favorite works, which he enjoyed playing at his organ concerts.

American Nathan Laube is a leading organist and teacher who is appreciated all over the world. His extensive concert career includes major venues such as the Wiener Konzerthaus, Hamburg Elbphilharmonie, Berlin Philharmonie, Maison Radio France in Paris, Auditorium Maurice Ravel in Lyon, Béla Bartók National Concert Hall in Budapest, Palau de la Música Catalana in Barcelona and Sejong Center in Seoul. He has appeared in Europe's most famous churches and cathedrals, including Notre-Dame Cathedral and Saint-Sulpice in Paris, St. Paul's Cathedral in London, Frauenkirche in Dresden and Berliner Dom. In 2022 he performed at the BBC Proms at the Royal Albert Hall in London. He is passionate about organ design and aesthetics and also acts as a consultant for new instruments. He participated in the construction of the Gothenburg Concert Hall organ in 2021 and inaugurated the organ in Musiikkitalo in Helsinki in 2024. In 2020 he played a solo concert on Austria's largest pipe organ built by Rieger in St. Stephen's Cathedral in Vienna, and in 2023 in the cathedral in Graz. His recording of Stephen Paulus' Grand Concerto with the Nashville Symphony was awarded a Grammy in 2016. In April 2019, Nathan Laube launched the radio program All the Stops, where he explores famous organs in Europe and the United States.

Camille Pépin (f 1990) Aux confins de l’orage (Swedish premiere) Sphères jaune-orange - Sylphes rouges - Jets bleus "At the Edge of the Storm" is a work inspired by three transient luminous phenomena preceding the storm. They occur in the upper atmosphere and are invisible from Earth (we can only observe lightning). To set to music to it, I imagined orchestral colors specific to each. The Yellow-Orange Spheres are disks of light propagating through space in concentric circles. Born from an electromagnetic impact in the ionosphere, they change color as they propagate, passing from yellow to orange-red. I represented this transformation with chord-spheres traveling from one music stand to another. From a thunderous aggregate, the Red Sylphs are born, lower in the mesosphere. They are liquid and incandescent filaments flowing towards the Earth and resolving into luminous volutes of intense red. Played by the high woodwinds, these threads never stop despite the explosions presaging the storm (timpani, bass drum, low winds). The final movement opens with a windy episode. Dark and mysterious with the deep colors of the orchestra, it makes the transition to the stratosphere. It is in this layer of the atmosphere, closest to us, that the Blue Jets burst forth at a hallucinatory speed. As brief as they are rapid, these veritable rocketing streaks of light are played by the woodwinds tinged with the brilliance of the keyboards. As they approach Earth, the sound becomes increasingly abrupt and dry. Finally, a final tumultuous rumble, a final clap of thunder: it's the storm. Camille Pépin

Carl Orff (1895-1982) Carmina Burana Fortuna imperatrix mundi - Primo vere - In taberna´- Cour d'amours - Blanziflor et Helena - Fortuna imperatrix mundi During the 1930s, Carl Orff was one of the most noted composers in Germany. Much of his fame came with Carmina burana which was composed in 1935-1936. Its subtitle reads "secular songs for soli and choir accompanied by orchestra and with magical images" - a scenography of a medieval kind where evocative paintings and decorations in concert with the large choir create an overwhelming impression. Carmina burana was first performed in Frankfurt am Main in 1937, given at La Scala in 1942 and shortly afterwards also in Vienna, but despite this Orff only became more widely known as a composer after the war. The music was not like anything else, it felt original and stood outside contemporary trends and schools. His musical inspiration can be said to have its roots in the dramatic imagery, with Greek tragedy and Italian baroque opera as two major sources of inspiration. Musically, there is a closer influence: Stravinsky's dramatic cantata Oedipus Rex and above all Les noces - rhythmically marked music of a deliberately simple style with a sparse orchestral movement (lots of percussion) and the choir as basic elements. Orff's work often grew out of a combined vision of the scenic and the musical - everything he created reveals a lush, visible imagination. Most of what he produced is intended for the stage, including Carmina burana. But the piece has shown its strength even without stage arrangements and is just as often performed in the concert hall with great success.

The Gothenburg Symphony was formed in 1905 and today consists of 109 musicians. The orchestra's base is Gothenburg Concert Hall at Götaplatsen that has gathered music lovers since 1935. Since the 2019-2020 season, Barbara Hannigan is Principal guest conductor. We are also a proud partner of Barbara Hannigan's Equilibrium mentoring program focusing on young singers at the start of their careers. The title Principal Guest Conductor is shared by Pekka Kuusisto from 2025. Wilhelm Stenhammar was the orchestra's chief conductor from 1907 to 1922. He gave the orchestra a strong Nordic profile and invited colleagues Carl Nielsen and Jean Sibelius to the orchestra. Under the direction of conductor Neeme Järvi from 1982-2004, the orchestra made a series of international tours as well as a hundred disc recordings and established themselves among Europe's leading orchestras. In 1996, the Swedish Riksdag appointed the Gothenburg Symphony as Sweden's National Orchestra. In recent decades, the orchestra has had prominent chief conductors such as Santtu-Matias Rouvali, Mario Venzago and Gustavo Dudamel, following Kent Nagano as Principal Guest conductor. Anna-Karin Larsson is CEO and artistic director, Gustavo Dudamel honorary conductor and Neeme Järvi chief conductor emeritus. The orchestra's owner is the Västra Götaland Region. The Gothenburg Symphony works regularly with conductors such as Herbert Blomstedt, Joana Carneiro, Jukka-Pekka Saraste, Christian Zacharias and Anja Bihlmaier.

Emilia Hoving has emerged as one of the most exciting young Finnish conductors today. In 2024-2025 she returned to prominent orchestras such as the Philharmonia Orchestra, the Swedish Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, the Helsinki Philharmonic, the BBC National Orchestra of Wales, the Norwegian Radio Orchestra, Malmö Symphony Orchestra, the Gothenburg Symphony and the Adelaide Symphony. She also made her debuts with the Strasbourg Philharmonic, the Belgian National, the Trondheim Symphony, the Stavanger Symphony, the Royal Scottish National, the Orquesta Castilla y Leon, the Tasmanian Symphony and the Netherlands Radio Philharmonic (at the Concertgebouw). Other highlights of the past season were the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France, the BBC Symphony, the Royal Philharmonic, the Tonkünstler Orchestra Wien, the Tenerife Symphony and the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra. Emilia Hoving conducted the final concert at Side by Side in 2025 and 2024 and the school concert Bubblor at the Gothenburg Symphony in 2023. In the summer of 2022, she made her Tokyo debut at Suntory Hall as conductor of the Yomiuri Nippon Symphony and her UK debut at the Philharmonia, where she has now become a regular guest. Hoving has conducted many works by living (especially Finnish) composers and gave the Australian premiere of Missy Mazzoli's Procession at the Adelaide Festival. Hoving studied at the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki with Sakari Oramo, Atso Almila and Jorma Panula. She received the Finnish Critics' Prize in 2021 as best newcomer and was an assistant to Hannu Lintu at Finnish Radio (2019) and to Mikko Franck at Radio France (2020-22).

The young Polish baritone David Roy has performed in Gianni at the Teatro Comunale Bolzano, in La traviata at the Opera Nova in Bydgoszcz and made his debut at the Royal Swedish Opera in The Barber of Seville. He also sang in Carmina Burana with the Kalisz Philharmonic. From the 2025-2026 season, he will join the Junges Ensemble at the Semperoper in Dresden. He is currently studying in the soloist class at the Hannover University of Music, Drama and Media. David Roy took his first steps on stage at the Opera Nova in Bydgoszcz. Since 2022, he has collaborated with the Royal Polish Opera in Warsaw and participated in the Rossini Festival in Pesaro. He has also won prizes in several prominent competitions.

Australian tenor Michael Smallwood commenced vocal training while completing a law degree the University of Melbourne. He joined the Opera Studio at the Hamburg State Opera in 2001. His wide repertoire ranges from Monteverdi, Handel, Gluck and Mozart via Flotow, Wagner and Verdi to Richard Strauss, Janacek, Britten and Berg. Guest engagements have taken him to La Scala in Milan, the Paris National Opera, the Opéra de Lyon, the Flemish Opera and the Dutch National Opera, the Gran Teatre del Liceu in Barcelona and the Teatro Real in Madrid. He works closely with the Staatsoper Unter den Linden in Berlin, where he has performed roles such as Mercure in Rameau's Hippolyte et Aricie, Monostatos in The Magic Flute, Goro in Madama Butterfly and Spoletta in Tosca. He has worked with renowned conductors such as Daniel Barenboim, Philippe Jordan, Sir Simon Rattle, Marek Janowski, René Jacobs and Vladimir Jurowski. His most recent engagements include Tosca at the Semperoper Dresden and the Opéra de Lyon. He has also sung Hansel and Gretel at the Nederlandse Reisopera and The Magic Flute at the Sydney Opera.

Swedish soprano Clarice Granado recently had great success in Carmina Burana at Folkoperan in Stockholm. She studied musical and acting at The American Musical and Dramatic Academy in New York and at the University College of Opera in Stockholm where she graduated in 2024. Clarice Clarice Granado made her operatic debut in the lead in Il Colore fa la Regina by Carlo Francesco Pollarolo in 2022 at the Vadstena Academy. In spring 2025 she sang Pamina at Folkoperan. She is also sought after as a concert singer with a wide ranging repertoir.

The choir was founded in 1917 by cousins Elsa and Wilhelm Stenhammar. Elsa Stenhammar was one of the driving forces in turn-of-the-century choir life in Gothenburg and became the choir's first rehearser. On December 8, 1917, the choir debuted in Beethoven's Choir Fantasy with Wilhelm Stenhammar as soloist at the grand piano. As the country's oldest symphonic choir, they were able to celebrate their 100th anniversary in 2017 with a big celebratory concert where Mozart and Brahms as well as Stenhammar, Elfrida Andrée and Björn & Benny were on the program. The Gothenburg Symphony Choir is a non-profit association that is linked to the Gothenburg Symphony. The choir participates in concerts and performances under both the orchestra's and its own auspices. The music is mixed and the repertoire extensive. The Gothenburg Symphony Choir has participated in concerts in, among other places, the Royal Albert Hall and Canterbury Cathedral in England, as well as participated with the Gothenburg Symphony in the annual music festival in the Canary Islands and on a tour to China.

The Gothenburg Symphony Vocal Ensemble (GSVE) was formed in 2016 and consists of 12 professional singers. The ensemble works both as part of the Gothenburg Symphony Choir in major symphonic works performed together with the Gothenburg Symphony, and as an independent ensemble under the direction of Katie Thomas. GSVE is a group of experienced and versatile singers, who perform varied programs and explore a wide repertoire, from medieval music to newly commissioned works. The ensemble has previously collaborated with, among others, the Helsingborg Symphony Orchestra and the Barockakademin Göteborgs Symfoniker and performs regular vocal programs both in Gothenburg's Concert Hall and around the Västra Götaland region.

Katie Thomas is a choral conductor from Wales and since 2023 the choirmaster of the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra. She is also the conductor and artistic director of the Gothenburg Symphony Vocal Ensemble. Previous engagements include nine years as a voice coach for the BBC Chorus, assignments as a guest choirmaster and conductor with the BBC Singers, MDR Rundfunkchor, National Youth Choirs of Great Britain and the Junior Royal College of Music, as well as a guest lecturer in choral conducting and director of the chamber choir at the University of Music and Performing Arts in Gothenburg. She has been a teacher of choral conducting techniques at the Association of British Choral Directors and a judge at choral festivals worldwide within the organization Interkultur. As a professional soprano, Katie Thomas has been engaged with the UK's leading choirs, such as the Monteverdi Choir under the direction of Sir John Eliot Gardiner, Polyphony and the Academy of Ancient Music. She has appeared in major concert venues in Europe and the USA, including the Concertgebouw Amsterdam, the Musikverein Vienna and Carnegie Hall in New York. Together with London Voices, she has recorded several soundtracks for films and video games, often at the renowned Abbey Road Studios, as well as concerts for both television and radio. Katie Thomas is a graduate of Cardiff University and the Royal Academy of Music in London. In 2020, she was appointed an Associate of the Royal Academy of Music (ARAM) in the United Kingdom for outstanding contributions to professional music and significant achievements in conducting and choral music.

Camille Pépin (f 1990) Aux confins de l’orage (Swedish premiere) Sphères jaune-orange - Sylphes rouges - Jets bleus "At the Edge of the Storm" is a work inspired by three transient luminous phenomena preceding the storm. They occur in the upper atmosphere and are invisible from Earth (we can only observe lightning). To set to music to it, I imagined orchestral colors specific to each. The Yellow-Orange Spheres are disks of light propagating through space in concentric circles. Born from an electromagnetic impact in the ionosphere, they change color as they propagate, passing from yellow to orange-red. I represented this transformation with chord-spheres traveling from one music stand to another. From a thunderous aggregate, the Red Sylphs are born, lower in the mesosphere. They are liquid and incandescent filaments flowing towards the Earth and resolving into luminous volutes of intense red. Played by the high woodwinds, these threads never stop despite the explosions presaging the storm (timpani, bass drum, low winds). The final movement opens with a windy episode. Dark and mysterious with the deep colors of the orchestra, it makes the transition to the stratosphere. It is in this layer of the atmosphere, closest to us, that the Blue Jets burst forth at a hallucinatory speed. As brief as they are rapid, these veritable rocketing streaks of light are played by the woodwinds tinged with the brilliance of the keyboards. As they approach Earth, the sound becomes increasingly abrupt and dry. Finally, a final tumultuous rumble, a final clap of thunder: it's the storm. Camille Pépin

Carl Orff (1895-1982) Carmina Burana Fortuna imperatrix mundi - Primo vere - In taberna´- Cour d'amours - Blanziflor et Helena - Fortuna imperatrix mundi During the 1930s, Carl Orff was one of the most noted composers in Germany. Much of his fame came with Carmina burana which was composed in 1935-1936. Its subtitle reads "secular songs for soli and choir accompanied by orchestra and with magical images" - a scenography of a medieval kind where evocative paintings and decorations in concert with the large choir create an overwhelming impression. Carmina burana was first performed in Frankfurt am Main in 1937, given at La Scala in 1942 and shortly afterwards also in Vienna, but despite this Orff only became more widely known as a composer after the war. The music was not like anything else, it felt original and stood outside contemporary trends and schools. His musical inspiration can be said to have its roots in the dramatic imagery, with Greek tragedy and Italian baroque opera as two major sources of inspiration. Musically, there is a closer influence: Stravinsky's dramatic cantata Oedipus Rex and above all Les noces - rhythmically marked music of a deliberately simple style with a sparse orchestral movement (lots of percussion) and the choir as basic elements. Orff's work often grew out of a combined vision of the scenic and the musical - everything he created reveals a lush, visible imagination. Most of what he produced is intended for the stage, including Carmina burana. But the piece has shown its strength even without stage arrangements and is just as often performed in the concert hall with great success.

The Gothenburg Symphony was formed in 1905 and today consists of 109 musicians. The orchestra's base is Gothenburg Concert Hall at Götaplatsen that has gathered music lovers since 1935. Since the 2019-2020 season, Barbara Hannigan is Principal guest conductor. We are also a proud partner of Barbara Hannigan's Equilibrium mentoring program focusing on young singers at the start of their careers. The title Principal Guest Conductor is shared by Pekka Kuusisto from 2025. Wilhelm Stenhammar was the orchestra's chief conductor from 1907 to 1922. He gave the orchestra a strong Nordic profile and invited colleagues Carl Nielsen and Jean Sibelius to the orchestra. Under the direction of conductor Neeme Järvi from 1982-2004, the orchestra made a series of international tours as well as a hundred disc recordings and established themselves among Europe's leading orchestras. In 1996, the Swedish Riksdag appointed the Gothenburg Symphony as Sweden's National Orchestra. In recent decades, the orchestra has had prominent chief conductors such as Santtu-Matias Rouvali, Mario Venzago and Gustavo Dudamel, following Kent Nagano as Principal Guest conductor. Anna-Karin Larsson is CEO and artistic director, Gustavo Dudamel honorary conductor and Neeme Järvi chief conductor emeritus. The orchestra's owner is the Västra Götaland Region. The Gothenburg Symphony works regularly with conductors such as Herbert Blomstedt, Joana Carneiro, Jukka-Pekka Saraste, Christian Zacharias and Anja Bihlmaier.

Emilia Hoving has emerged as one of the most exciting young Finnish conductors today. In 2024-2025 she returned to prominent orchestras such as the Philharmonia Orchestra, the Swedish Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, the Helsinki Philharmonic, the BBC National Orchestra of Wales, the Norwegian Radio Orchestra, Malmö Symphony Orchestra, the Gothenburg Symphony and the Adelaide Symphony. She also made her debuts with the Strasbourg Philharmonic, the Belgian National, the Trondheim Symphony, the Stavanger Symphony, the Royal Scottish National, the Orquesta Castilla y Leon, the Tasmanian Symphony and the Netherlands Radio Philharmonic (at the Concertgebouw). Other highlights of the past season were the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France, the BBC Symphony, the Royal Philharmonic, the Tonkünstler Orchestra Wien, the Tenerife Symphony and the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra. Emilia Hoving conducted the final concert at Side by Side in 2025 and 2024 and the school concert Bubblor at the Gothenburg Symphony in 2023. In the summer of 2022, she made her Tokyo debut at Suntory Hall as conductor of the Yomiuri Nippon Symphony and her UK debut at the Philharmonia, where she has now become a regular guest. Hoving has conducted many works by living (especially Finnish) composers and gave the Australian premiere of Missy Mazzoli's Procession at the Adelaide Festival. Hoving studied at the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki with Sakari Oramo, Atso Almila and Jorma Panula. She received the Finnish Critics' Prize in 2021 as best newcomer and was an assistant to Hannu Lintu at Finnish Radio (2019) and to Mikko Franck at Radio France (2020-22).

The young Polish baritone David Roy has performed in Gianni at the Teatro Comunale Bolzano, in La traviata at the Opera Nova in Bydgoszcz and made his debut at the Royal Swedish Opera in The Barber of Seville. He also sang in Carmina Burana with the Kalisz Philharmonic. From the 2025-2026 season, he will join the Junges Ensemble at the Semperoper in Dresden. He is currently studying in the soloist class at the Hannover University of Music, Drama and Media. David Roy took his first steps on stage at the Opera Nova in Bydgoszcz. Since 2022, he has collaborated with the Royal Polish Opera in Warsaw and participated in the Rossini Festival in Pesaro. He has also won prizes in several prominent competitions.

Swedish soprano Clarice Granado recently had great success in Carmina Burana at Folkoperan in Stockholm. She studied musical and acting at The American Musical and Dramatic Academy in New York and at the University College of Opera in Stockholm where she graduated in 2024. Clarice Clarice Granado made her operatic debut in the lead in Il Colore fa la Regina by Carlo Francesco Pollarolo in 2022 at the Vadstena Academy. In spring 2025 she sang Pamina at Folkoperan. She is also sought after as a concert singer with a wide ranging repertoir.

Australian tenor Michael Smallwood commenced vocal training while completing a law degree the University of Melbourne. He joined the Opera Studio at the Hamburg State Opera in 2001. His wide repertoire ranges from Monteverdi, Handel, Gluck and Mozart via Flotow, Wagner and Verdi to Richard Strauss, Janacek, Britten and Berg. Guest engagements have taken him to La Scala in Milan, the Paris National Opera, the Opéra de Lyon, the Flemish Opera and the Dutch National Opera, the Gran Teatre del Liceu in Barcelona and the Teatro Real in Madrid. He works closely with the Staatsoper Unter den Linden in Berlin, where he has performed roles such as Mercure in Rameau's Hippolyte et Aricie, Monostatos in The Magic Flute, Goro in Madama Butterfly and Spoletta in Tosca. He has worked with renowned conductors such as Daniel Barenboim, Philippe Jordan, Sir Simon Rattle, Marek Janowski, René Jacobs and Vladimir Jurowski. His most recent engagements include Tosca at the Semperoper Dresden and the Opéra de Lyon. He has also sung Hansel and Gretel at the Nederlandse Reisopera and The Magic Flute at the Sydney Opera.

The choir was founded in 1917 by cousins Elsa and Wilhelm Stenhammar. Elsa Stenhammar was one of the driving forces in turn-of-the-century choir life in Gothenburg and became the choir's first rehearser. On December 8, 1917, the choir debuted in Beethoven's Choir Fantasy with Wilhelm Stenhammar as soloist at the grand piano. As the country's oldest symphonic choir, they were able to celebrate their 100th anniversary in 2017 with a big celebratory concert where Mozart and Brahms as well as Stenhammar, Elfrida Andrée and Björn & Benny were on the program. The Gothenburg Symphony Choir is a non-profit association that is linked to the Gothenburg Symphony. The choir participates in concerts and performances under both the orchestra's and its own auspices. The music is mixed and the repertoire extensive. The Gothenburg Symphony Choir has participated in concerts in, among other places, the Royal Albert Hall and Canterbury Cathedral in England, as well as participated with the Gothenburg Symphony in the annual music festival in the Canary Islands and on a tour to China.

The Gothenburg Symphony Vocal Ensemble (GSVE) was formed in 2016 and consists of 12 professional singers. The ensemble works both as part of the Gothenburg Symphony Choir in major symphonic works performed together with the Gothenburg Symphony, and as an independent ensemble under the direction of Katie Thomas. GSVE is a group of experienced and versatile singers, who perform varied programs and explore a wide repertoire, from medieval music to newly commissioned works. The ensemble has previously collaborated with, among others, the Helsingborg Symphony Orchestra and the Barockakademin Göteborgs Symfoniker and performs regular vocal programs both in Gothenburg's Concert Hall and around the Västra Götaland region.

Katie Thomas is a choral conductor from Wales and since 2023 the choirmaster of the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra. She is also the conductor and artistic director of the Gothenburg Symphony Vocal Ensemble. Previous engagements include nine years as a voice coach for the BBC Chorus, assignments as a guest choirmaster and conductor with the BBC Singers, MDR Rundfunkchor, National Youth Choirs of Great Britain and the Junior Royal College of Music, as well as a guest lecturer in choral conducting and director of the chamber choir at the University of Music and Performing Arts in Gothenburg. She has been a teacher of choral conducting techniques at the Association of British Choral Directors and a judge at choral festivals worldwide within the organization Interkultur. As a professional soprano, Katie Thomas has been engaged with the UK's leading choirs, such as the Monteverdi Choir under the direction of Sir John Eliot Gardiner, Polyphony and the Academy of Ancient Music. She has appeared in major concert venues in Europe and the USA, including the Concertgebouw Amsterdam, the Musikverein Vienna and Carnegie Hall in New York. Together with London Voices, she has recorded several soundtracks for films and video games, often at the renowned Abbey Road Studios, as well as concerts for both television and radio. Katie Thomas is a graduate of Cardiff University and the Royal Academy of Music in London. In 2020, she was appointed an Associate of the Royal Academy of Music (ARAM) in the United Kingdom for outstanding contributions to professional music and significant achievements in conducting and choral music.

Richard Wagner (1813–1883) Wesendonck Lieder Fünf Gedichte von Mathilde Wesendonk Der Engel · Stehe still · Im Treibhaus · Schmerzen · Träume Richard Wagner only composed around twenty songs, including a handful in 1839–1842, when he tried in vain to win the hearts of Parisians. The next step was in 1857–1858: in political asylum in Zürich during his most revolutionary period, he simultaneously became involved in a passionate romance with Mathilde Wesendonck, the wife of a wealthy Swiss silk merchant. Wagner and his wife had a cottage on the family’s estate in the countryside. One thing is for certain: as a revolutionary, Wagner was guided more by artistic dreams than political convictions. He worked on Tristan und Isolde and read his libretto for the opera to his lover. She was delighted and responded with her own poetry, which was infused with the same spirit. Wagner was captivated by her poems and set them to music. He composed Der Engel, Schmerzen and Träume in the winter of 1857. They were completed the following May. In the first poem, she presents Wagner as the savior of art. He himself wrote on the sheet music for the sketches of the first act of Tristan: “To the angel who lifted me so high.” Love may have enchanted them, but in concrete terms, the work on Mathilde’s five poems contributed inspiration to Tristan. Material from Im Treibhaus (In the Greenhouse) was incorporated into the introduction to the third act. Schmerzen (Pain) begins with the same chord that also begins the second act, and Träume (Dreams) can be seen as an early version of the love duet in the same act.

Richard Wagner (1813-1883) Der Ring ohne Worte, arr Lorin Maazel Das Rheingold: In The Greenish Twilight Of The Rhine - Entrance Of The Gods Into Valhalla - Hammering dwarfs Smithying Away - Ride Donner’s Thunderbolt Die Walküre: Siegmund and Sieglinde - Their Flight - Wotan’s Rage - Ride Of The Valkyries - Wotan’s Farewell Siegfried: Mime’s Fright - Siegfried’s Forging of The Magic Sword - Forest Murmurs - His Slaying Of The Dragon - Dragon’s Lament Götterdämmerung: Day Breaking ’Round Siegfried’s And Brünnhilde’s Passion - Siegfried’s Rhine Journey - Hagen’s Call to his Clans - Siegfried And The Rhinemaidens - Siegfried’s Death And Funeral Music - Immolation Scene The American conductor Lorin Maazel took it upon himself to arrange Wagner's mammoth operas in a symphonic version. The goal was to recreate the same mythological story without the singers' text, with the same components as Wagner's original. The background was Maazel's meeting with Wagner's grandson, the theater director Wieland Wagner, who pointed out that the orchestra is the very source: "In the orchestra - that's where the essence lies - it's the text under the text, it's the universal subconscious that connects Wagner's characters with each other," he was to have said. At the Deutsche Oper Berlin, the Ring cycle had not been performed since before the Second World War. When Lorin Maazel took over the opera in 1965, he was fascinated by the challenge: could it be possible to reveal the essential components of the Ring's sound code through a symphonic synthesis? Lorin Maazel himself says: “So we begin in the green twilight of the Rhine, drift upstream to the castle of the gods, sink down to the blacksmith dwarfs, swing with the thunder hammer, crawl with the thirsty Siegmund to the temporary hearth.... In the sound code we also literally see Siegmund’s ‘sympathetic gaze’ at Sieglinde, their escape, Wotan’s terrible rage, Brünnhilde’s sisters’ Valkyrie ride, Wotan’s painful farewell to his beloved daughter. We see Siegfried forging the magic sword, slaying the dragon, hearing Fafner’s weak lament. ... and finally - the end of the gods in the firelight. Although I have not consciously tried to include all the ring motifs, most of them appear in one form or another.” Lorin Maazel recorded the work in 1987 with Berliner Philharmoniker and conducted the concert premiere in 1990.

The Gothenburg Symphony was formed in 1905 and today consists of 109 musicians. The orchestra's base is Gothenburg Concert Hall at Götaplatsen that has gathered music lovers since 1935. Since the 2019-2020 season, Barbara Hannigan is Principal guest conductor. We are also a proud partner of Barbara Hannigan's Equilibrium mentoring program focusing on young singers at the start of their careers. The title Principal Guest Conductor is shared by Pekka Kuusisto from 2025. Wilhelm Stenhammar was the orchestra's chief conductor from 1907 to 1922. He gave the orchestra a strong Nordic profile and invited colleagues Carl Nielsen and Jean Sibelius to the orchestra. Under the direction of conductor Neeme Järvi from 1982-2004, the orchestra made a series of international tours as well as a hundred disc recordings and established themselves among Europe's leading orchestras. In 1996, the Swedish Riksdag appointed the Gothenburg Symphony as Sweden's National Orchestra. In recent decades, the orchestra has had prominent chief conductors such as Santtu-Matias Rouvali, Mario Venzago and Gustavo Dudamel, following Kent Nagano as Principal Guest conductor. Anna-Karin Larsson is CEO and artistic director, Gustavo Dudamel honorary conductor and Neeme Järvi chief conductor emeritus. The orchestra's owner is the Västra Götaland Region. The Gothenburg Symphony works regularly with conductors such as Herbert Blomstedt, Joana Carneiro, Jukka-Pekka Saraste, Christian Zacharias and Anja Bihlmaier.

Cornelius Meister has been General Music Director of the Staatsoper Stuttgart and the Staatsorchester Stuttgart since 2018. He was Principal Conductor and Artistic Director of the ORF Radio-Symphonieorchester Wien from 2010 to 2018 as well as Principal Guest Conductor of the Yomiuri Nippon Symphony Orchestra from 2017 to 2020. A passionate advocate for cultural participation, Cornelius Meister devotes himself to educational and outreach projects for audiences of all ages, which often introduce them to a symphony orchestra for the first time. In the 2025/26 season he conducts new productions of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg and Dialogues des Carmélites, as well as revivals of Don Giovanni and Madama Butterfly. He also completes the cycle of Mahler’s symphonies. Further engagements in this season include returns to the Wiener Staatsoper and the ORF Radio-Symphonieorchester Wien. As a pianist, he has been invited to perform in the Wiener Philharmoniker's chamber music cycle. He continues to strengthen his relationships with orchestras in Valencia, Geneva, Strasbourg and Frankfurt, and makes his debuts in Bordeaux, Warsaw and with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra in London Since performing his first world premiere as a ten-year-old pianist, Cornelius Meister has been committed to contemporary composers; in 2004 he became Pierre Boulez’s assistant.His operatic career began at the age of 21 at the Hamburgische Staatsoper.

Season 2025-2026 Cornelia Beskow sings Berg's Sieben frühe Lieder with the Turku Philharmonic Orchestra and makes her debut as Elsa Lohengrin at the Vienna State Opera. She returns to Den Norske Opera & Ballet and to Roma Teatro dell'Opera in the title role in Jenufa, in Elektra, Die Walküre and Eugen Onegin, and to the Royal Swedish Opera in Jenufa. She also makes her debut at the Prague National Opera in the title role as Ariadne of Naxos. She has previously sung Ellen Orford in Britten's Peter Grimes in Warsaw, Katerina in Shostakovich's Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, Senta in The Flying Dutchman at Opera Østfold in Fredriksten and Malmö Opera, Donna Elvira in Don Giovanni at the Royal Swedish Opera, Wellgunde in Das Rheingold at Dalhalla, as well as in Das Rosenkavalier and in Dead Man Walking at the Royal Danish Opera in Copenhagen. Cornelia Beskow is trained at the Opera Academy of Copenhagen and the Swedish Opera Academy. In addition to a thriving career on the opera stage, Cornelia Beskow regularly sings concerts, with repertoire ranging from Wagner, Mahler and Chausson to Strauss, Britten, Sibelius and Nyström. She won the Lauritz Melchior International Singing Competition in 2017 and was the recipient of the Birgit Nilsson Scholarship in 2022.

Richard Wagner (1813–1883) Wesendonck Lieder Fünf Gedichte von Mathilde Wesendonk Der Engel · Stehe still · Im Treibhaus · Schmerzen · Träume Richard Wagner only composed around twenty songs, including a handful in 1839–1842, when he tried in vain to win the hearts of Parisians. The next step was in 1857–1858: in political asylum in Zürich during his most revolutionary period, he simultaneously became involved in a passionate romance with Mathilde Wesendonck, the wife of a wealthy Swiss silk merchant. Wagner and his wife had a cottage on the family’s estate in the countryside. One thing is for certain: as a revolutionary, Wagner was guided more by artistic dreams than political convictions. He worked on Tristan und Isolde and read his libretto for the opera to his lover. She was delighted and responded with her own poetry, which was infused with the same spirit. Wagner was captivated by her poems and set them to music. He composed Der Engel, Schmerzen and Träume in the winter of 1857. They were completed the following May. In the first poem, she presents Wagner as the savior of art. He himself wrote on the sheet music for the sketches of the first act of Tristan: “To the angel who lifted me so high.” Love may have enchanted them, but in concrete terms, the work on Mathilde’s five poems contributed inspiration to Tristan. Material from Im Treibhaus (In the Greenhouse) was incorporated into the introduction to the third act. Schmerzen (Pain) begins with the same chord that also begins the second act, and Träume (Dreams) can be seen as an early version of the love duet in the same act.

Richard Wagner (1813-1883) Der Ring ohne Worte, arr Lorin Maazel Das Rheingold: In The Greenish Twilight Of The Rhine - Entrance Of The Gods Into Valhalla - Hammering dwarfs Smithying Away - Ride Donner’s Thunderbolt Die Walküre: Siegmund and Sieglinde - Their Flight - Wotan’s Rage - Ride Of The Valkyries - Wotan’s Farewell Siegfried: Mime’s Fright - Siegfried’s Forging of The Magic Sword - Forest Murmurs - His Slaying Of The Dragon - Dragon’s Lament Götterdämmerung: Day Breaking ’Round Siegfried’s And Brünnhilde’s Passion - Siegfried’s Rhine Journey - Hagen’s Call to his Clans - Siegfried And The Rhinemaidens - Siegfried’s Death And Funeral Music - Immolation Scene The American conductor Lorin Maazel took it upon himself to arrange Wagner's mammoth operas in a symphonic version. The goal was to recreate the same mythological story without the singers' text, with the same components as Wagner's original. The background was Maazel's meeting with Wagner's grandson, the theater director Wieland Wagner, who pointed out that the orchestra is the very source: "In the orchestra - that's where the essence lies - it's the text under the text, it's the universal subconscious that connects Wagner's characters with each other," he was to have said. At the Deutsche Oper Berlin, the Ring cycle had not been performed since before the Second World War. When Lorin Maazel took over the opera in 1965, he was fascinated by the challenge: could it be possible to reveal the essential components of the Ring's sound code through a symphonic synthesis? Lorin Maazel himself says: “So we begin in the green twilight of the Rhine, drift upstream to the castle of the gods, sink down to the blacksmith dwarfs, swing with the thunder hammer, crawl with the thirsty Siegmund to the temporary hearth.... In the sound code we also literally see Siegmund’s ‘sympathetic gaze’ at Sieglinde, their escape, Wotan’s terrible rage, Brünnhilde’s sisters’ Valkyrie ride, Wotan’s painful farewell to his beloved daughter. We see Siegfried forging the magic sword, slaying the dragon, hearing Fafner’s weak lament. ... and finally - the end of the gods in the firelight. Although I have not consciously tried to include all the ring motifs, most of them appear in one form or another.” Lorin Maazel recorded the work in 1987 with Berliner Philharmoniker and conducted the concert premiere in 1990.

The Gothenburg Symphony was formed in 1905 and today consists of 109 musicians. The orchestra's base is Gothenburg Concert Hall at Götaplatsen that has gathered music lovers since 1935. Since the 2019-2020 season, Barbara Hannigan is Principal guest conductor. We are also a proud partner of Barbara Hannigan's Equilibrium mentoring program focusing on young singers at the start of their careers. The title Principal Guest Conductor is shared by Pekka Kuusisto from 2025. Wilhelm Stenhammar was the orchestra's chief conductor from 1907 to 1922. He gave the orchestra a strong Nordic profile and invited colleagues Carl Nielsen and Jean Sibelius to the orchestra. Under the direction of conductor Neeme Järvi from 1982-2004, the orchestra made a series of international tours as well as a hundred disc recordings and established themselves among Europe's leading orchestras. In 1996, the Swedish Riksdag appointed the Gothenburg Symphony as Sweden's National Orchestra. In recent decades, the orchestra has had prominent chief conductors such as Santtu-Matias Rouvali, Mario Venzago and Gustavo Dudamel, following Kent Nagano as Principal Guest conductor. Anna-Karin Larsson is CEO and artistic director, Gustavo Dudamel honorary conductor and Neeme Järvi chief conductor emeritus. The orchestra's owner is the Västra Götaland Region. The Gothenburg Symphony works regularly with conductors such as Herbert Blomstedt, Joana Carneiro, Jukka-Pekka Saraste, Christian Zacharias and Anja Bihlmaier.

Cornelius Meister has been General Music Director of the Staatsoper Stuttgart and the Staatsorchester Stuttgart since 2018. He was Principal Conductor and Artistic Director of the ORF Radio-Symphonieorchester Wien from 2010 to 2018 as well as Principal Guest Conductor of the Yomiuri Nippon Symphony Orchestra from 2017 to 2020. A passionate advocate for cultural participation, Cornelius Meister devotes himself to educational and outreach projects for audiences of all ages, which often introduce them to a symphony orchestra for the first time. In the 2025/26 season he conducts new productions of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg and Dialogues des Carmélites, as well as revivals of Don Giovanni and Madama Butterfly. He also completes the cycle of Mahler’s symphonies. Further engagements in this season include returns to the Wiener Staatsoper and the ORF Radio-Symphonieorchester Wien. As a pianist, he has been invited to perform in the Wiener Philharmoniker's chamber music cycle. He continues to strengthen his relationships with orchestras in Valencia, Geneva, Strasbourg and Frankfurt, and makes his debuts in Bordeaux, Warsaw and with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra in London Since performing his first world premiere as a ten-year-old pianist, Cornelius Meister has been committed to contemporary composers; in 2004 he became Pierre Boulez’s assistant.His operatic career began at the age of 21 at the Hamburgische Staatsoper.

Season 2025-2026 Cornelia Beskow sings Berg's Sieben frühe Lieder with the Turku Philharmonic Orchestra and makes her debut as Elsa Lohengrin at the Vienna State Opera. She returns to Den Norske Opera & Ballet and to Roma Teatro dell'Opera in the title role in Jenufa, in Elektra, Die Walküre and Eugen Onegin, and to the Royal Swedish Opera in Jenufa. She also makes her debut at the Prague National Opera in the title role as Ariadne of Naxos. She has previously sung Ellen Orford in Britten's Peter Grimes in Warsaw, Katerina in Shostakovich's Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, Senta in The Flying Dutchman at Opera Østfold in Fredriksten and Malmö Opera, Donna Elvira in Don Giovanni at the Royal Swedish Opera, Wellgunde in Das Rheingold at Dalhalla, as well as in Das Rosenkavalier and in Dead Man Walking at the Royal Danish Opera in Copenhagen. Cornelia Beskow is trained at the Opera Academy of Copenhagen and the Swedish Opera Academy. In addition to a thriving career on the opera stage, Cornelia Beskow regularly sings concerts, with repertoire ranging from Wagner, Mahler and Chausson to Strauss, Britten, Sibelius and Nyström. She won the Lauritz Melchior International Singing Competition in 2017 and was the recipient of the Birgit Nilsson Scholarship in 2022.

Highlighting the home region was an expression of Finnish patriotism and the fight for freedom, which was highly relevant in Sibelius' time. One of the more effective artistic expressions of that time was the equivalent of today's art installation: the so-called tableau. Imagine a stage with natural environments, backdrops, props and decorations (scenography, that is) and place real and living people in this room, standing motionless in predetermined poses with convincing expressions. The Vyborg student department at the University of Helsinki had decided to depict important events in the history of Karelia, and Sibelius was asked to write music for these tableaus. The Karelian city of Vyborg was founded by Swedes at the end of the 13th century and was Finland's second largest city until World War II. A contemporary description of the three tableaux reads: Intermezzo: "To the sounds of fanfares and festive processional music, the people of Karelia carry out their tribute to a Lithuanian prince." Ballad: "Karl Knutsson, overthrown from his throne, listens to a monotonous stylized Finnish song and then dreams himself back to the moods of bygone years, colored by a Scandinavian ballad: the girl in the 'rose haven'." Alla marcia: "Pontus de la Gardie and his troops march towards Kexholm Castle on the vast Lake Ladoga." Sibelius originally composed an overture and music for eight tableaux. The overture was published as an independent work, and parts of tableaux nos. 3, 4 and 5 as this Karelia Suite.

Wilhelm Stenhammar was a brilliant pianist who played Beethoven and Mozart's concertos as a soloist, and he toured the whole country with piano recitals or as a chamber musician. He was also one of the foremost Swedish conductors of the time and as such director of the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra for many years. In addition, he was a romantic composer with a classical and clear musical language. His two symphonies and piano concertos, the serenade for orchestra, choral works, string quartets, songs and piano pieces are among the most beloved Swedish standard repertoire. He was very self-critical, and after listening to his colleague and friend Jean Sibelius's second symphony, he no longer wanted to hear about his own first - and he waited decades before he dared to write his second. The piece Reverenza has a peculiar background. "I want to write as beautifully about the South as only a Northerner can," Stenhammar wrote in a letter. He wants to write about "flutes and oboes that quintillate like thrushes," about "long, sucking string phrases," about "something at the same time sensual and spiritual, about the strong scent of flowers in pure, sunny air." He was in Florence when he began thinking about Serenade for orchestra in March 1907, which was completed in 1914. A brilliant movement of its own came to live a life of its own under the name Reverenza. It is now often played as a standalone piece, a kind of minuet pastiche, unless one chooses to let it ring in its original place during performances of the Serenade.

Andreas Hanson is leader of the Västra Götalands Youth Symphony from 2025. He studied conducting at the Royal Academy of Music in Stockholm, London and Milan. He is a guest conductor of the major Swedish orchestras and appears as a guest conductor in Europe. He has recorded nearly 20 albums for BIS, Serpent and Chandos. With a strong passion for contemporary music, he has premiered over a hundred contemporary works. After decades as chief conductor of national wind ensembles, Andreas Hanson has also built up an extensive repertoire knowledge of Nordic musical treasures and symphonic wind music. He has a great commitment to the next generation of musicians and conductors and to the music creation of the future. He is teaching conducting at the Royal Academy of Music and works with Dirigentløftet in Norway.

Highlighting the home region was an expression of Finnish patriotism and the fight for freedom, which was highly relevant in Sibelius' time. One of the more effective artistic expressions of that time was the equivalent of today's art installation: the so-called tableau. Imagine a stage with natural environments, backdrops, props and decorations (scenography, that is) and place real and living people in this room, standing motionless in predetermined poses with convincing expressions. The Vyborg student department at the University of Helsinki had decided to depict important events in the history of Karelia, and Sibelius was asked to write music for these tableaus. The Karelian city of Vyborg was founded by Swedes at the end of the 13th century and was Finland's second largest city until World War II. A contemporary description of the three tableaux reads: Intermezzo: "To the sounds of fanfares and festive processional music, the people of Karelia carry out their tribute to a Lithuanian prince." Ballad: "Karl Knutsson, overthrown from his throne, listens to a monotonous stylized Finnish song and then dreams himself back to the moods of bygone years, colored by a Scandinavian ballad: the girl in the 'rose haven'." Alla marcia: "Pontus de la Gardie and his troops march towards Kexholm Castle on the vast Lake Ladoga." Sibelius originally composed an overture and music for eight tableaux. The overture was published as an independent work, and parts of tableaux nos. 3, 4 and 5 as this Karelia Suite.

Wilhelm Stenhammar was a brilliant pianist who played Beethoven and Mozart's concertos as a soloist, and he toured the whole country with piano recitals or as a chamber musician. He was also one of the foremost Swedish conductors of the time and as such director of the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra for many years. In addition, he was a romantic composer with a classical and clear musical language. His two symphonies and piano concertos, the serenade for orchestra, choral works, string quartets, songs and piano pieces are among the most beloved Swedish standard repertoire. He was very self-critical, and after listening to his colleague and friend Jean Sibelius's second symphony, he no longer wanted to hear about his own first - and he waited decades before he dared to write his second. The piece Reverenza has a peculiar background. "I want to write as beautifully about the South as only a Northerner can," Stenhammar wrote in a letter. He wants to write about "flutes and oboes that quintillate like thrushes," about "long, sucking string phrases," about "something at the same time sensual and spiritual, about the strong scent of flowers in pure, sunny air." He was in Florence when he began thinking about Serenade for orchestra in March 1907, which was completed in 1914. A brilliant movement of its own came to live a life of its own under the name Reverenza. It is now often played as a standalone piece, a kind of minuet pastiche, unless one chooses to let it ring in its original place during performances of the Serenade.

Andreas Hanson is leader of the Västra Götalands Youth Symphony from 2025. He studied conducting at the Royal Academy of Music in Stockholm, London and Milan. He is a guest conductor of the major Swedish orchestras and appears as a guest conductor in Europe. He has recorded nearly 20 albums for BIS, Serpent and Chandos. With a strong passion for contemporary music, he has premiered over a hundred contemporary works. After decades as chief conductor of national wind ensembles, Andreas Hanson has also built up an extensive repertoire knowledge of Nordic musical treasures and symphonic wind music. He has a great commitment to the next generation of musicians and conductors and to the music creation of the future. He is teaching conducting at the Royal Academy of Music and works with Dirigentløftet in Norway.

Zoltán Kodály (1882-1967) Galántai táncok Ancient Hungarian peasant music, still unchanged in the villages, began to be recorded by Zoltán Kodály and Bartók around 1905. Both composers were captivated by the unique Romani verbunkos music. In the small Slovak town of Galánta, fifty kilometers from Bratislava, next to the train line between Vienna and Budapest, there was a famous Romani music chapel that gave Kodály his earliest taste for orchestral sound. Dances from Galánta were written in 1933 for the 80th anniversary of the Budapest Philharmonic. The instrumentation for double flutes (plus piccolo), oboes, A-clarinets, bassoons, plus four horns, timpani, snare drum, glockenspiel, triangle and strings imitated such a verbunkos band with a solo clarinet in the lead role as the Romani tárogáto. The story goes that the Galánta pieces were originally composed during Hungary's struggle for independence under Turkish occupation. Verbunkos music began to be published in sheet music in the late 18th century, not least in Vienna, where both Mozart and Schubert were strongly influenced by it. Kodály uses the slow verbunkos introduction as a rondo theme in the following four dances as well as in the great final coda. It alone takes up more than half the length of the piece. As a respected professor at the Budapest Academy of Music and president of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, and later an honorary doctor in Oxford and Berlin, Kodály would promote the importance of spontaneous folk music. This liberal orientation also permeated key earlier works such as the Háry János Suite of 1927 and the Dances from Marosszék of 1933, both of which, along with the Galánta Dances, were his most frequently performed works.

Paul Hindemith (1895-1963) Violin Concerto Mässig bewegte Halbe Langsam Lebhaft Before Paul Hindemith got his breake through as a composer, he was renowned as a skilled instrumentalist on the violin and later also on the viola and viola d’amore. His interest in these instruments was evident early on in his Bach-inspired Kammermusik from the 1920s, in which both the viola and the viola d’amore act as soloists. Despite this, Hindemith wrote only one violin concerto with full orchestra, a work that is usually pointed out as his best both for violin and in concert form, from 1939. The year before, in 1938, he left Germany because his wife had Jewish roots. When the violin concerto had its world premiere in Amsterdam in 1940, not long before the Nazis entered Holland, Hindemith and his wife were already in the United States. Over the next few decades, the concerto was performed regularly, but has since lost some of its popularity. Despite the troubled circumstances surrounding its creation, the violin concerto is an energetic and lively work. It is virtuosic, urbane, and encompasses everything from grandeur to lyrical intimacy.

Antonín Dvorák (1841-1904) Symphony No. 8 Op 88 A few years before Antonín Dvorák left for America, the Eighth Symphony grew during long walks in the woods and fields. The Eighth Symphony is the result of a conscious search for peace and harmony. When the storm sometimes roars for the sake of contrast, it only blows away the dry leaves and brings fresh air with it. It is a happily smiling music, a simple, folk fiddler's music that deviates from the strict symphonic traditions. The first movement begins with a sonorous cello theme that then returns twice during the movement; in the introduction to the development and in the recapitulation. The movement closely follows the sonata form despite the great changes in emotion. The slow movement is an adagio in C minor that is built up from a string of beautiful episodes. Then follows a graceful and elastic waltz before the finale once again presents a short introduction consisting of a trumpet solo. This solo also recurs a few times, including as a pianissimo accompaniment to solo flute and played by trumpets and horns. An outward-looking coda concludes the symphony. On 2 February 1890, this G major symphony was premiered with the composer himself conducting the National Theatre Orchestra in Prague, and he also conducted performances in London and Frankfurt shortly afterwards. The symphony would soon triumph around the world, and alongside the Ninth Symphony (From the New World), written in America, it became the most beloved of his symphonies. The symphony was dedicated to the "Bohemian Franz Joseph Academy for the Promotion of Art and Literature", in thanks for Dvorák becoming its honorary member.

The Gothenburg Symphony was formed in 1905 and today consists of 109 musicians. The orchestra's base is Gothenburg Concert Hall at Götaplatsen that has gathered music lovers since 1935. Since the 2019-2020 season, Barbara Hannigan is Principal guest conductor. We are also a proud partner of Barbara Hannigan's Equilibrium mentoring program focusing on young singers at the start of their careers. The title Principal Guest Conductor is shared by Pekka Kuusisto from 2025. Wilhelm Stenhammar was the orchestra's chief conductor from 1907 to 1922. He gave the orchestra a strong Nordic profile and invited colleagues Carl Nielsen and Jean Sibelius to the orchestra. Under the direction of conductor Neeme Järvi from 1982-2004, the orchestra made a series of international tours as well as a hundred disc recordings and established themselves among Europe's leading orchestras. In 1996, the Swedish Riksdag appointed the Gothenburg Symphony as Sweden's National Orchestra. In recent decades, the orchestra has had prominent chief conductors such as Santtu-Matias Rouvali, Mario Venzago and Gustavo Dudamel, following Kent Nagano as Principal Guest conductor. Anna-Karin Larsson is CEO and artistic director, Gustavo Dudamel honorary conductor and Neeme Järvi chief conductor emeritus. The orchestra's owner is the Västra Götaland Region. The Gothenburg Symphony works regularly with conductors such as Herbert Blomstedt, Joana Carneiro, Jukka-Pekka Saraste, Christian Zacharias and Anja Bihlmaier.

Jaime Martín is Chief Conductor of the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra since 2022. He has also been Music Director of the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra since 2019 and Chief Conductor of Ireland's RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra. He was Artistic Director and Chief Conductor of the Gävle Symphony Orchestra 2013-2022. In Spain, he holds the position of Principal Guest Conductor of the Spanish National Orchestra. Highlights of recent seasons have included debuts with the Dallas and Indianapolis Symphony Orchestras and the Dresden Philharmonic, an extensive tour of the UK with the Gävle Symphony Orchestra, and his debut performance as a conductor at the BBC Proms with the BBC National Orchestra of Wales. He has also guested with the Budapest Festival Orchestra, the Royal Swedish Philharmonic, the Queensland Symphony, the Colorado Symphony, the BBC National Orchestra of Wales, the Orquesta Sinfonica de Galicia and the Orquesta Sinfonica de Castilla y Leon. His discography includes Mozart's wind concertos with the London Symphony Orchestra, a series for Ondine Records with the Gävle Symphony Orchestra including Brahms' Serenades, Brahms' choral works with the Eric Ericsons Chamber Choir, and works by Swedish composer Melcher Melchers. Before taking on full-time conducting in 2013, Martín was principal flautist with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, Chamber Orchestra of Europe, English National Opera, Academy of St Martin in the Fields and London Philharmonic Orchestra, and a sought-after soloist.

Zoltán Kodály (1882-1967) Galántai táncok Ancient Hungarian peasant music, still unchanged in the villages, began to be recorded by Zoltán Kodály and Bartók around 1905. Both composers were captivated by the unique Romani verbunkos music. In the small Slovak town of Galánta, fifty kilometers from Bratislava, next to the train line between Vienna and Budapest, there was a famous Romani music chapel that gave Kodály his earliest taste for orchestral sound. Dances from Galánta were written in 1933 for the 80th anniversary of the Budapest Philharmonic. The instrumentation for double flutes (plus piccolo), oboes, A-clarinets, bassoons, plus four horns, timpani, snare drum, glockenspiel, triangle and strings imitated such a verbunkos band with a solo clarinet in the lead role as the Romani tárogáto. The story goes that the Galánta pieces were originally composed during Hungary's struggle for independence under Turkish occupation. Verbunkos music began to be published in sheet music in the late 18th century, not least in Vienna, where both Mozart and Schubert were strongly influenced by it. Kodály uses the slow verbunkos introduction as a rondo theme in the following four dances as well as in the great final coda. It alone takes up more than half the length of the piece. As a respected professor at the Budapest Academy of Music and president of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, and later an honorary doctor in Oxford and Berlin, Kodály would promote the importance of spontaneous folk music. This liberal orientation also permeated key earlier works such as the Háry János Suite of 1927 and the Dances from Marosszék of 1933, both of which, along with the Galánta Dances, were his most frequently performed works.

Paul Hindemith (1895-1963) Violin Concerto Mässig bewegte Halbe Langsam Lebhaft Before Paul Hindemith got his breake through as a composer, he was renowned as a skilled instrumentalist on the violin and later also on the viola and viola d’amore. His interest in these instruments was evident early on in his Bach-inspired Kammermusik from the 1920s, in which both the viola and the viola d’amore act as soloists. Despite this, Hindemith wrote only one violin concerto with full orchestra, a work that is usually pointed out as his best both for violin and in concert form, from 1939. The year before, in 1938, he left Germany because his wife had Jewish roots. When the violin concerto had its world premiere in Amsterdam in 1940, not long before the Nazis entered Holland, Hindemith and his wife were already in the United States. Over the next few decades, the concerto was performed regularly, but has since lost some of its popularity. Despite the troubled circumstances surrounding its creation, the violin concerto is an energetic and lively work. It is virtuosic, urbane, and encompasses everything from grandeur to lyrical intimacy.

Antonín Dvorák (1841-1904) Symphony No. 8 Op 88 A few years before Antonín Dvorák left for America, the Eighth Symphony grew during long walks in the woods and fields. The Eighth Symphony is the result of a conscious search for peace and harmony. When the storm sometimes roars for the sake of contrast, it only blows away the dry leaves and brings fresh air with it. It is a happily smiling music, a simple, folk fiddler's music that deviates from the strict symphonic traditions. The first movement begins with a sonorous cello theme that then returns twice during the movement; in the introduction to the development and in the recapitulation. The movement closely follows the sonata form despite the great changes in emotion. The slow movement is an adagio in C minor that is built up from a string of beautiful episodes. Then follows a graceful and elastic waltz before the finale once again presents a short introduction consisting of a trumpet solo. This solo also recurs a few times, including as a pianissimo accompaniment to solo flute and played by trumpets and horns. An outward-looking coda concludes the symphony. On 2 February 1890, this G major symphony was premiered with the composer himself conducting the National Theatre Orchestra in Prague, and he also conducted performances in London and Frankfurt shortly afterwards. The symphony would soon triumph around the world, and alongside the Ninth Symphony (From the New World), written in America, it became the most beloved of his symphonies. The symphony was dedicated to the "Bohemian Franz Joseph Academy for the Promotion of Art and Literature", in thanks for Dvorák becoming its honorary member.

The Gothenburg Symphony was formed in 1905 and today consists of 109 musicians. The orchestra's base is Gothenburg Concert Hall at Götaplatsen that has gathered music lovers since 1935. Since the 2019-2020 season, Barbara Hannigan is Principal guest conductor. We are also a proud partner of Barbara Hannigan's Equilibrium mentoring program focusing on young singers at the start of their careers. The title Principal Guest Conductor is shared by Pekka Kuusisto from 2025. Wilhelm Stenhammar was the orchestra's chief conductor from 1907 to 1922. He gave the orchestra a strong Nordic profile and invited colleagues Carl Nielsen and Jean Sibelius to the orchestra. Under the direction of conductor Neeme Järvi from 1982-2004, the orchestra made a series of international tours as well as a hundred disc recordings and established themselves among Europe's leading orchestras. In 1996, the Swedish Riksdag appointed the Gothenburg Symphony as Sweden's National Orchestra. In recent decades, the orchestra has had prominent chief conductors such as Santtu-Matias Rouvali, Mario Venzago and Gustavo Dudamel, following Kent Nagano as Principal Guest conductor. Anna-Karin Larsson is CEO and artistic director, Gustavo Dudamel honorary conductor and Neeme Järvi chief conductor emeritus. The orchestra's owner is the Västra Götaland Region. The Gothenburg Symphony works regularly with conductors such as Herbert Blomstedt, Joana Carneiro, Jukka-Pekka Saraste, Christian Zacharias and Anja Bihlmaier.

Jaime Martín is Chief Conductor of the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra since 2022. He has also been Music Director of the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra since 2019 and Chief Conductor of Ireland's RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra. He was Artistic Director and Chief Conductor of the Gävle Symphony Orchestra 2013-2022. In Spain, he holds the position of Principal Guest Conductor of the Spanish National Orchestra. Highlights of recent seasons have included debuts with the Dallas and Indianapolis Symphony Orchestras and the Dresden Philharmonic, an extensive tour of the UK with the Gävle Symphony Orchestra, and his debut performance as a conductor at the BBC Proms with the BBC National Orchestra of Wales. He has also guested with the Budapest Festival Orchestra, the Royal Swedish Philharmonic, the Queensland Symphony, the Colorado Symphony, the BBC National Orchestra of Wales, the Orquesta Sinfonica de Galicia and the Orquesta Sinfonica de Castilla y Leon. His discography includes Mozart's wind concertos with the London Symphony Orchestra, a series for Ondine Records with the Gävle Symphony Orchestra including Brahms' Serenades, Brahms' choral works with the Eric Ericsons Chamber Choir, and works by Swedish composer Melcher Melchers. Before taking on full-time conducting in 2013, Martín was principal flautist with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, Chamber Orchestra of Europe, English National Opera, Academy of St Martin in the Fields and London Philharmonic Orchestra, and a sought-after soloist.

Symphonies of Wind Instruments (1920) On several different occasions, Igor Stravinsky wrote musical works in memory of departed friends and acquaintances. Common to all these works is that they are very short and concise, some have playing times of just a few minutes. In an interview in The New York Times, Stravinsky describes Symphonies for Winds as "a grand song, an objective scream of wind instruments, instead of the warm human tone of the violins". Immediately upon hearing that Claude Debussy had died, he telegraphed his condolences to the widow Emma, and wrote a short fragment which was published in a supplement to La Revue Musicale. This fragment was the first he wrote for what would become Symphonies for Winds, but in the finished composition this is the very conclusion. The work came to consist of nine quite distinct motifs used as short choruses and episodes. The score was dated 30 November 1920, and premiered in London on 10 June 1921, without particular success. Stravinsky himself was displeased and never allowed this version to be published. (Now this version is also available in print.) He withdrew the piece, and between 1945 and 1947 it underwent a thorough and simplified revision, which was published in 1948, at which time he gave the work its established title: Symphonies (in the plural!) for wind instruments. It is not a symphony, and that word should be understood as "consonance". Although it is the memory of fellow composer Debussy that is apostrophized, Stravinsky certainly did not strive to imitate Debussy's tonal language. Rather the opposite. But it is obvious that it is a solemn tribute to a great colleague.

John Adams (f 1947) After the Fall (Gothenburg Symphony Co-commission) After the Fall is John Adams's third full-scale concerto for solo piano, following Century Rolls (1996), written for Emanuel Ax, and Must the Devil Have All the Good Tunes? (2018), composed for Yuja Wang. Pianist Víkingur Ólafsson made a powerful impression on Adams when he played Must the Devil Have All the Good Tunes? across Europe. “Víkingur possesses an enormously wide bandwidth of expressive possibility. His Rameau and Bach and Mozart have incredible delicacy, but when the music calls for it, he can make the piano sound huge without banging it. I tried to incorporate that awareness into After the Fall.” The title, After the Fall, is a nod to another piano concerto, No Such Spring, by his son Samuel Carl Adams. “I was so overwhelmed by it that I really didn’t think I could ever write another piano concerto,” Adams recalls. “So the title is partly a tip of the hat to Sam’s piece: there is no such spring after the fall.” The double entendre of “fall”—as both the season and the “loss of Paradise”—reminded Adams of Pierre Boulez’s dystopian declaration that “the era of avant-gardes and exploration being definitely over, what follows is the era of perpetual return, consolidation, citation...” In the culminating section of After the Fall, Adams stages the infiltration of the C-minor Prelude from Book I of Bach’s The Well-Tempered Clavier, utilizing a similar “hall of mirrors” technique first encountered in his 2012 Beethoven-inspired Absolute Jest for string quartet and orchestra. The composer wryly notes that while at work on the piece last season, Ólafsson was engaged in an international tour comprising 88 performances of the Goldberg Variations: “Something of Bach was bound to leak into my piece, I guess.” John Adams’s After the Fall was co-commissioned by the San Francisco Symphony, Tonhalle Orchester Zürich, Paris Philharmonie, Elbphilharmonie Hamburg, Philharmonia Orchestra (London), Gothenburg Symphony, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde in Wien, and the Wiener Symphoniker, with premiere in San Francisco in January 2025. 2025 Boosey & Hawkes

John Adams (b 1947) The Chairman Dances John Adams wrote this “foxtrot for orchestra” while working on his later highly acclaimed opera Nixon in China (1986). It is set in communist China. John Adams tells the story: “I started somewhat hazily working on the music, not knowing if it had the right tone, and pretty soon I realized it wouldn't work at all for the opera — it was a parody of what I imagined Chinese movie music of the '30s sounded like....[a] vast fantasy of a slightly ridiculous but irresistible image of a youthful Mao Tse Tung dancing the foxtrot with his mistress Chiang Ch'ing, former movie queen and the future Madame Mao, the mind and spirit behind the Cultural Revolution and the strident, unrehabilitated member of the Gang of Four. Formally,The Chairman Dances is in three parts, A-B-A, with a persistent, chugging pulse in the basses marking the outer sections. Romance makes an appearance in the central, slower section.”

Claude Debussy (1862- 1918) Images: no. 2 Ibéria Images pour orchestre is an orchestral composition in three sections, which followed the piano composition Images from 1905. Debussy decided that an orchestral version was more inspiring than another one for piano. The second part of this collection of images, Ibéria, is the most played. We get to look into the street life of a Spanish city, smell the scents of the night and hear the preparations for a festival. The sounds evoke patterns of Spanish flavors, Moorish-influenced melodies and dance rhythms. Debussy had not himself been to Spain but tried to reflect elements he saw in the art in musical form.

The Gothenburg Symphony was formed in 1905 and today consists of 109 musicians. The orchestra's base is Gothenburg Concert Hall at Götaplatsen that has gathered music lovers since 1935. Since the 2019-2020 season, Barbara Hannigan is Principal guest conductor. We are also a proud partner of Barbara Hannigan's Equilibrium mentoring program focusing on young singers at the start of their careers. The title Principal Guest Conductor is shared by Pekka Kuusisto from 2025. Wilhelm Stenhammar was the orchestra's chief conductor from 1907 to 1922. He gave the orchestra a strong Nordic profile and invited colleagues Carl Nielsen and Jean Sibelius to the orchestra. Under the direction of conductor Neeme Järvi from 1982-2004, the orchestra made a series of international tours as well as a hundred disc recordings and established themselves among Europe's leading orchestras. In 1996, the Swedish Riksdag appointed the Gothenburg Symphony as Sweden's National Orchestra. In recent decades, the orchestra has had prominent chief conductors such as Santtu-Matias Rouvali, Mario Venzago and Gustavo Dudamel, following Kent Nagano as Principal Guest conductor. Anna-Karin Larsson is CEO and artistic director, Gustavo Dudamel honorary conductor and Neeme Järvi chief conductor emeritus. The orchestra's owner is the Västra Götaland Region. The Gothenburg Symphony works regularly with conductors such as Herbert Blomstedt, Joana Carneiro, Jukka-Pekka Saraste, Christian Zacharias and Anja Bihlmaier.

Composer, conductor, and creative thinker - John Adams occupies a unique position in the world of music. His compositions span more than three decades and are among the most performed of all contemporary classical music, including Nixon in China, Harmonielehre, Doctor Atomic, Shaker Loops, El Niño, Short Ride in a Fast Machine, and The Dharma at Big Sur. His stage work in collaboration with director Peter Sellars has transformed contemporary musical theater. Adams is a recipient of numerous Grammy Awards and has conducted major orchestras in repertoire ranging from Beethoven and Mozart to Stravinsky, Ives, Carter, Glass, and Ellington. Recent engagements include the London Symphony, Berliner Philharmoniker, Cleveland Orchestra, Los Angeles Philharmonic, and New York Phil. An advocate for young composers, Adams has conducted over 100 world premieres during his career. Born and raised in New England, Adams learned the clarinet from his father. He began composing at the age of ten. He has received honorary doctorates from Yale, Harvard, Northwestern, Cambridge and The Juilliard School and has written the autobiography Hallelujah Junction. He has been artistic director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic since 2009. This is his first visit as conductor to the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra.

Symphonies of Wind Instruments (1920) On several different occasions, Igor Stravinsky wrote musical works in memory of departed friends and acquaintances. Common to all these works is that they are very short and concise, some have playing times of just a few minutes. In an interview in The New York Times, Stravinsky describes Symphonies for Winds as "a grand song, an objective scream of wind instruments, instead of the warm human tone of the violins". Immediately upon hearing that Claude Debussy had died, he telegraphed his condolences to the widow Emma, and wrote a short fragment which was published in a supplement to La Revue Musicale. This fragment was the first he wrote for what would become Symphonies for Winds, but in the finished composition this is the very conclusion. The work came to consist of nine quite distinct motifs used as short choruses and episodes. The score was dated 30 November 1920, and premiered in London on 10 June 1921, without particular success. Stravinsky himself was displeased and never allowed this version to be published. (Now this version is also available in print.) He withdrew the piece, and between 1945 and 1947 it underwent a thorough and simplified revision, which was published in 1948, at which time he gave the work its established title: Symphonies (in the plural!) for wind instruments. It is not a symphony, and that word should be understood as "consonance". Although it is the memory of fellow composer Debussy that is apostrophized, Stravinsky certainly did not strive to imitate Debussy's tonal language. Rather the opposite. But it is obvious that it is a solemn tribute to a great colleague.

John Adams (f 1947) After the Fall (Gothenburg Symphony Co-commission) After the Fall is John Adams's third full-scale concerto for solo piano, following Century Rolls (1996), written for Emanuel Ax, and Must the Devil Have All the Good Tunes? (2018), composed for Yuja Wang. Pianist Víkingur Ólafsson made a powerful impression on Adams when he played Must the Devil Have All the Good Tunes? across Europe. “Víkingur possesses an enormously wide bandwidth of expressive possibility. His Rameau and Bach and Mozart have incredible delicacy, but when the music calls for it, he can make the piano sound huge without banging it. I tried to incorporate that awareness into After the Fall.” The title, After the Fall, is a nod to another piano concerto, No Such Spring, by his son Samuel Carl Adams. “I was so overwhelmed by it that I really didn’t think I could ever write another piano concerto,” Adams recalls. “So the title is partly a tip of the hat to Sam’s piece: there is no such spring after the fall.” The double entendre of “fall”—as both the season and the “loss of Paradise”—reminded Adams of Pierre Boulez’s dystopian declaration that “the era of avant-gardes and exploration being definitely over, what follows is the era of perpetual return, consolidation, citation...” In the culminating section of After the Fall, Adams stages the infiltration of the C-minor Prelude from Book I of Bach’s The Well-Tempered Clavier, utilizing a similar “hall of mirrors” technique first encountered in his 2012 Beethoven-inspired Absolute Jest for string quartet and orchestra. The composer wryly notes that while at work on the piece last season, Ólafsson was engaged in an international tour comprising 88 performances of the Goldberg Variations: “Something of Bach was bound to leak into my piece, I guess.” John Adams’s After the Fall was co-commissioned by the San Francisco Symphony, Tonhalle Orchester Zürich, Paris Philharmonie, Elbphilharmonie Hamburg, Philharmonia Orchestra (London), Gothenburg Symphony, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde in Wien, and the Wiener Symphoniker, with premiere in San Francisco in January 2025. 2025 Boosey & Hawkes

John Adams (b 1947) The Chairman Dances John Adams wrote this “foxtrot for orchestra” while working on his later highly acclaimed opera Nixon in China (1986). It is set in communist China. John Adams tells the story: “I started somewhat hazily working on the music, not knowing if it had the right tone, and pretty soon I realized it wouldn't work at all for the opera — it was a parody of what I imagined Chinese movie music of the '30s sounded like....[a] vast fantasy of a slightly ridiculous but irresistible image of a youthful Mao Tse Tung dancing the foxtrot with his mistress Chiang Ch'ing, former movie queen and the future Madame Mao, the mind and spirit behind the Cultural Revolution and the strident, unrehabilitated member of the Gang of Four. Formally,The Chairman Dances is in three parts, A-B-A, with a persistent, chugging pulse in the basses marking the outer sections. Romance makes an appearance in the central, slower section.”

Claude Debussy (1862- 1918) Images: no. 2 Ibéria Images pour orchestre is an orchestral composition in three sections, which followed the piano composition Images from 1905. Debussy decided that an orchestral version was more inspiring than another one for piano. The second part of this collection of images, Ibéria, is the most played. We get to look into the street life of a Spanish city, smell the scents of the night and hear the preparations for a festival. The sounds evoke patterns of Spanish flavors, Moorish-influenced melodies and dance rhythms. Debussy had not himself been to Spain but tried to reflect elements he saw in the art in musical form.

The Gothenburg Symphony was formed in 1905 and today consists of 109 musicians. The orchestra's base is Gothenburg Concert Hall at Götaplatsen that has gathered music lovers since 1935. Since the 2019-2020 season, Barbara Hannigan is Principal guest conductor. We are also a proud partner of Barbara Hannigan's Equilibrium mentoring program focusing on young singers at the start of their careers. The title Principal Guest Conductor is shared by Pekka Kuusisto from 2025. Wilhelm Stenhammar was the orchestra's chief conductor from 1907 to 1922. He gave the orchestra a strong Nordic profile and invited colleagues Carl Nielsen and Jean Sibelius to the orchestra. Under the direction of conductor Neeme Järvi from 1982-2004, the orchestra made a series of international tours as well as a hundred disc recordings and established themselves among Europe's leading orchestras. In 1996, the Swedish Riksdag appointed the Gothenburg Symphony as Sweden's National Orchestra. In recent decades, the orchestra has had prominent chief conductors such as Santtu-Matias Rouvali, Mario Venzago and Gustavo Dudamel, following Kent Nagano as Principal Guest conductor. Anna-Karin Larsson is CEO and artistic director, Gustavo Dudamel honorary conductor and Neeme Järvi chief conductor emeritus. The orchestra's owner is the Västra Götaland Region. The Gothenburg Symphony works regularly with conductors such as Herbert Blomstedt, Joana Carneiro, Jukka-Pekka Saraste, Christian Zacharias and Anja Bihlmaier.

Composer, conductor, and creative thinker - John Adams occupies a unique position in the world of music. His compositions span more than three decades and are among the most performed of all contemporary classical music, including Nixon in China, Harmonielehre, Doctor Atomic, Shaker Loops, El Niño, Short Ride in a Fast Machine, and The Dharma at Big Sur. His stage work in collaboration with director Peter Sellars has transformed contemporary musical theater. Adams is a recipient of numerous Grammy Awards and has conducted major orchestras in repertoire ranging from Beethoven and Mozart to Stravinsky, Ives, Carter, Glass, and Ellington. Recent engagements include the London Symphony, Berliner Philharmoniker, Cleveland Orchestra, Los Angeles Philharmonic, and New York Phil. An advocate for young composers, Adams has conducted over 100 world premieres during his career. Born and raised in New England, Adams learned the clarinet from his father. He began composing at the age of ten. He has received honorary doctorates from Yale, Harvard, Northwestern, Cambridge and The Juilliard School and has written the autobiography Hallelujah Junction. He has been artistic director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic since 2009. This is his first visit as conductor to the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra.

Charles Ives (1874-1954) The Unanswered Question The Unanswered Question by Charles Ives is a work as mysterious as it was ahead of its time. From its composition in 1908, it took until 1946 before it was first performed. Today it is one of his best-known works. The piece is a kind of collage in three layers. The first layer, the strings, forms a slow, simple and tonal background. It represents the “silence of the druids”. On top of this, a lone trumpet returns with a short atonal motif. It is the “eternal question of existence”. The trumpet is in turn accompanied by woodwinds that, equally atonally, but increasingly faster, louder and more eager, try to answer the trumpet’s question – in vain. The question remains unanswered. The strings continue as if nothing has happened. How the “question” of existence has been interpreted has varied. The piece appears everywhere, from the war film The Thin Red Line to A Quiet Passion about the poet Emily Dickinson. It also gave name to Leonard Bernstein's lectures on the existence or non-existence of tonality. One theory is that Ives' title is taken from the poem The Sphinx by Ralph Waldo Emerson. The clash between the tonal and the atonal would then reflect the relationship between the spiritual and the physical – and how they actually belong together. A question without answer, but one that we cannot help asking again and again.

Ruth Crawford Seeger (1901-1953) Andante For Strings Ruth Crawford Seeger was an experimental composer and part of the American avant-garde of the 1920s. Yet many of her works remain unpublished today. Unfortunately, her career was short. The string quartet is often hailed as her great masterpiece. It was composed in 1931 in Berlin, where she traveled to study as the first woman on a Guggenheim scholarship. She then rearranged the slow movement for string orchestra under the name Andante for Strings. She described her early music as “a tree of light and timbre colors.” It is a description that fits well with this atmospheric, flowing and slightly harsh work. She wanted to write music that was dissonant, but at the same time simple and could appeal to ordinary people, without being dry and intellectual. After Berlin, she married her music teacher. They became politically involved, put music in the service of class struggle, and abandoned modernism. She stopped composing her own music altogether. Only when the children had moved out did she resume her own composing, but was then interrupted by cancer and died in 1953.

Joseph Haydn (1732–1809) Symphony No. 64 “Tempura mutantur” Allegro con spirito Largo Menuetto & Trio: Allegretto Finale: Presto Joseph Haydn composed most of his symphonies (the last one is number 104!) for the immensely wealthy Prince Esterházy, with whom he was employed for almost 40 years. The symphony that musicologist Hoboken gave as number 64 in his chronological list of Haydn's symphonies was probably written sometime between 1773 and 1775. This means that it is one of the last symphonies that are counted as Haydn's "Sturm und Drang period", where emotions flared up. Like so many other of Haydn's symphonies, this one also has a nickname and it is reproduced in the composer's own manuscript: Tempura mutantur. This old Latin proverb was very well known and has a continuation: Tempura mutantur, nos et mutamur in illis, which can be translated "Times change and we with them". Haydn himself has not given any explanation for the name, but perhaps he wanted to point out that with this work he was entering a new way of looking at music and life. As conductor of a court orchestra, Haydn had the privilege of being able to immediately perform his new works, and this time he had composed a work in four movements for strings and two each for oboes and horns. As usual he offers wonders of musical ingenuity and intelligence. After a couple of lyrical bars in pianissimo, an outburst of four chords follows before everything develops instrumentally and melodically. The slow movement is written for the broad melodies of the muted strings. For a long time, the movement seems to be written entirely for strings, but halfway through, the winds come in surprisingly and powerfully. After a light and bright minuet, a concluding presto follows in a peculiar rondo form.

György Ligeti (1923-2006) Atmosphères It was only when György Ligeti fled his native Hungary during the 1956 uprising that the world became aware of his epoch-making innovations. He came to be counted among the most important and avant-garde artists on the barricades. He hit the ground running with works such as Atmosphères, Aventures, Nouvelles Aventures and Requiem. Ligeti presented himself as a sky-rocketer who was bolder and more consistently modern than anyone ever heard of, and he shook the establishment. The massive orchestral work Atmosphères was premiered in Donaueschingen in 1961 with Hans Rosbaud as conductor. It was not long before the piece achieved cult status. Stanley Kubrick furthered its fame when he used the music in his film 2001: A Space Odyssey, where it fit like a glove. Each instrument (!) has its own part in its own notation system in the meter-high score. The first thing you hear is a chromatic cluster that covers five octaves. It is the overall sound that matters, and it only changes the tone color and dynamics. There are no rhythmic or melodic motifs here. In some places, the brass musicians blow straight through their instruments without creating any tone, and towards the end, the strings of the grand piano are struck with soft mallets. In the middle of the piece, the piccolo and violins reach their highest register, only to dive down to extreme double bass depth after a breath. Immediately afterwards, a 56-part canon begins where the parts hook into each other with as short a gap as possible. It is not possible, nor is it intended, for you to be able to follow what is happening in this micropolyphony. Stig Jacobsson

Richard Strauss (1864-1949) Also sprach Zarathustra The music is in no way a musical translation of Nietzsche's controversial theories about the übermensch. Richard Strauss saw the positive sides of the author's message: the demand for freedom, the longing for a better world, the power of action. The descriptions of nature were the most important source of inspiration. The extensive orchestral poem breaks up into nine sections, whose titles correspond to the names of the chapters in the book (but not always in the same order). Between these there are only three general pauses, the rest is in one go. As a motto he placed Nietzsche's "ode to the sun" with the call that "Too long have we dreamed of music, let us now wake up. We were sleepwalkers, let us now go out into the day..." The whole work begins with the sunrise: after long, grinding and very low C in double basses, double bassoon and organ, the sun breaks out in the notes C, G and C2. This is probably the most brilliant sunrise in the entire history of music, and just like Ligeti's music, it became the motif in the film 2001 – A Space Odyssey. The following parts have the titles: "About the inhabitants of the afterlife", "About the great longing" and "About the joy and passions", where the oboe intones a mournful melody. It is the dreams of youth that are buried. "The Night Wanderer's Song" is a heartbreaking farewell song where the description of nature returns in a reconciling C major in the basses. In the music, C major represents man and nature, while B major represents the universe - two keys that are very far apart. Neither of them emerges victorious from the battle at the end of the piece. Stig Jacobsson

The Gothenburg Symphony was formed in 1905 and today consists of 109 musicians. The orchestra's base is Gothenburg Concert Hall at Götaplatsen that has gathered music lovers since 1935. Since the 2019-2020 season, Barbara Hannigan is Principal guest conductor. We are also a proud partner of Barbara Hannigan's Equilibrium mentoring program focusing on young singers at the start of their careers. The title Principal Guest Conductor is shared by Pekka Kuusisto from 2025. Wilhelm Stenhammar was the orchestra's chief conductor from 1907 to 1922. He gave the orchestra a strong Nordic profile and invited colleagues Carl Nielsen and Jean Sibelius to the orchestra. Under the direction of conductor Neeme Järvi from 1982-2004, the orchestra made a series of international tours as well as a hundred disc recordings and established themselves among Europe's leading orchestras. In 1996, the Swedish Riksdag appointed the Gothenburg Symphony as Sweden's National Orchestra. In recent decades, the orchestra has had prominent chief conductors such as Santtu-Matias Rouvali, Mario Venzago and Gustavo Dudamel, following Kent Nagano as Principal Guest conductor. Anna-Karin Larsson is CEO and artistic director, Gustavo Dudamel honorary conductor and Neeme Järvi chief conductor emeritus. The orchestra's owner is the Västra Götaland Region. The Gothenburg Symphony works regularly with conductors such as Herbert Blomstedt, Joana Carneiro, Jukka-Pekka Saraste, Christian Zacharias and Anja Bihlmaier.

Soprano and conductor Barbara Hannigan is Principal Guest Conductor of the Gothenburg Symphony since 2019. Embodying music with an unparalleled dramatic sensibility, Barbara Hannigan's pioneering work was rewarded with the Polar Muisc Prize 2025. Her artistic colleagues include John Zorn, Krszysztof Warlikowski, Simon Rattle, Sasha Waltz, Kent Nagano, Vladimir Jurowski, Andreas Kriegenburg, Andris Nelsons, Esa Pekka Salonen, Christoph Marthaler, Antonio Pappano, Katie Mitchell, and Kirill Petrenko. The late conductor and pianist Reinbert de Leeuw has been an extraordinary influence and inspiration on her development as a musician. The Grammy Award winning Canadian musician has shown a profound commitment to the music of our time and has given the world première performances of nearly 100 new creations. Hannigan has collaborated extensively with composers including Boulez, Zorn, Dutilleux, Ligeti, di Castri, Stockhausen, Khayam, Sciarrino, Barry, Dusapin, Dean, Benjamin and Abrahamsen. A passionate musician of unique and courageous choices, Hannigan is renowned for creating innovative orchestral programs, combining new and older repertoire. In recent years she has been conducting world class orchestras including the Concertgebouw and Cleveland Orchestras, Montreal Symphony, Rome's Accademmia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia, has ongoing relationships with festivals including Aix en Provence and Spoleto, and has had starring soprano roles on opera stages including London's Covent Garden, Teatro San Carlo in Naples, Paris Opera's Palais Garnier, New York's Lincoln Center, and the opera houses of Berlin, Hamburg and Munich. The past few seasons have brought a new presentation of Poulenc's opera La Voix Humaine, and recent world premieres include Golfam Khayam's I am not a tale to be told with Iceland Symphony Orchestra, John Zorn's Split the Lark and Star Catcher, Zosha di Castri's In the Half Light with the Toronto and Montreal Symphony Orchestras, new works by Sandström and Sciarrino, and a project with pianists Katia and Marielle Labeque inspired by the life and music of Hildegard von Bingen with new music from David Chalmin and Bryce Dessner. In the 2024-2025 season with the Gothenburg Symphony she performed the program Americana, which depicts USA in the making, as well as Mozart's Requiem and Berg's Violin Concerto with Veronica Eberle. She performed chamber music by Schönberg, Fauré and Chausson. She also guested London Symphony, Munich Philharmonic, Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France, Danish Radio Symphony Orchestra, Iceland Symphony, l'Orchestre de Chambre de Lausanne and Kollegium Musicum WInterthur. In 2026 she will take the helm of Iceland Symphony Orchestra as their chief conductor and artistic director. Barbara’s commitment to the younger generation of musicians led her to create the mentoring initiatives Equilibrium Young Artists (2017), and Momentum: our Future Now (2020), both initiatives offering both guidance and performing opportunities to young professional artists. She was recently named the Reinbert de Leeuw Professor of Music at London's Royal Academy of Music and has been visiting professor at the Juilliard School in New York. On record, Barbara Hannigan’s fruitful relationship with Alpha Classics began in 2017 with the release of Crazy Girl Crazy, winning a Grammy and a Juno. More critically-acclaimed recordings followed, including Vienna: fin de siècle with pianist Reinbert de Leeuw, La Passione featuring works by Nono, Haydn and Grisey and Infinite Voyage, joining her colleagues of the Emerson String Quartet. In 2024 she released the ecstatic vocal works of Messiaen with pianist Bertrand Chamayou and a live recording of John Zorn’s compositions with pianist Stephen Gosling. Barbara Hannigan resides in Finistère, on the northwest coast of France.

Charles Ives (1874-1954) The Unanswered Question The Unanswered Question by Charles Ives is a work as mysterious as it was ahead of its time. From its composition in 1908, it took until 1946 before it was first performed. Today it is one of his best-known works. The piece is a kind of collage in three layers. The first layer, the strings, forms a slow, simple and tonal background. It represents the “silence of the druids”. On top of this, a lone trumpet returns with a short atonal motif. It is the “eternal question of existence”. The trumpet is in turn accompanied by woodwinds that, equally atonally, but increasingly faster, louder and more eager, try to answer the trumpet’s question – in vain. The question remains unanswered. The strings continue as if nothing has happened. How the “question” of existence has been interpreted has varied. The piece appears everywhere, from the war film The Thin Red Line to A Quiet Passion about the poet Emily Dickinson. It also gave name to Leonard Bernstein's lectures on the existence or non-existence of tonality. One theory is that Ives' title is taken from the poem The Sphinx by Ralph Waldo Emerson. The clash between the tonal and the atonal would then reflect the relationship between the spiritual and the physical – and how they actually belong together. A question without answer, but one that we cannot help asking again and again.

Ruth Crawford Seeger (1901-1953) Andante For Strings Ruth Crawford Seeger was an experimental composer and part of the American avant-garde of the 1920s. Yet many of her works remain unpublished today. Unfortunately, her career was short. The string quartet is often hailed as her great masterpiece. It was composed in 1931 in Berlin, where she traveled to study as the first woman on a Guggenheim scholarship. She then rearranged the slow movement for string orchestra under the name Andante for Strings. She described her early music as “a tree of light and timbre colors.” It is a description that fits well with this atmospheric, flowing and slightly harsh work. She wanted to write music that was dissonant, but at the same time simple and could appeal to ordinary people, without being dry and intellectual. After Berlin, she married her music teacher. They became politically involved, put music in the service of class struggle, and abandoned modernism. She stopped composing her own music altogether. Only when the children had moved out did she resume her own composing, but was then interrupted by cancer and died in 1953.

Joseph Haydn (1732–1809) Symphony No. 64 “Tempura mutantur” Allegro con spirito Largo Menuetto & Trio: Allegretto Finale: Presto Joseph Haydn composed most of his symphonies (the last one is number 104!) for the immensely wealthy Prince Esterházy, with whom he was employed for almost 40 years. The symphony that musicologist Hoboken gave as number 64 in his chronological list of Haydn's symphonies was probably written sometime between 1773 and 1775. This means that it is one of the last symphonies that are counted as Haydn's "Sturm und Drang period", where emotions flared up. Like so many other of Haydn's symphonies, this one also has a nickname and it is reproduced in the composer's own manuscript: Tempura mutantur. This old Latin proverb was very well known and has a continuation: Tempura mutantur, nos et mutamur in illis, which can be translated "Times change and we with them". Haydn himself has not given any explanation for the name, but perhaps he wanted to point out that with this work he was entering a new way of looking at music and life. As conductor of a court orchestra, Haydn had the privilege of being able to immediately perform his new works, and this time he had composed a work in four movements for strings and two each for oboes and horns. As usual he offers wonders of musical ingenuity and intelligence. After a couple of lyrical bars in pianissimo, an outburst of four chords follows before everything develops instrumentally and melodically. The slow movement is written for the broad melodies of the muted strings. For a long time, the movement seems to be written entirely for strings, but halfway through, the winds come in surprisingly and powerfully. After a light and bright minuet, a concluding presto follows in a peculiar rondo form.

György Ligeti (1923-2006) Atmosphères It was only when György Ligeti fled his native Hungary during the 1956 uprising that the world became aware of his epoch-making innovations. He came to be counted among the most important and avant-garde artists on the barricades. He hit the ground running with works such as Atmosphères, Aventures, Nouvelles Aventures and Requiem. Ligeti presented himself as a sky-rocketer who was bolder and more consistently modern than anyone ever heard of, and he shook the establishment. The massive orchestral work Atmosphères was premiered in Donaueschingen in 1961 with Hans Rosbaud as conductor. It was not long before the piece achieved cult status. Stanley Kubrick furthered its fame when he used the music in his film 2001: A Space Odyssey, where it fit like a glove. Each instrument (!) has its own part in its own notation system in the meter-high score. The first thing you hear is a chromatic cluster that covers five octaves. It is the overall sound that matters, and it only changes the tone color and dynamics. There are no rhythmic or melodic motifs here. In some places, the brass musicians blow straight through their instruments without creating any tone, and towards the end, the strings of the grand piano are struck with soft mallets. In the middle of the piece, the piccolo and violins reach their highest register, only to dive down to extreme double bass depth after a breath. Immediately afterwards, a 56-part canon begins where the parts hook into each other with as short a gap as possible. It is not possible, nor is it intended, for you to be able to follow what is happening in this micropolyphony. Stig Jacobsson

Richard Strauss (1864-1949) Also sprach Zarathustra The music is in no way a musical translation of Nietzsche's controversial theories about the übermensch. Richard Strauss saw the positive sides of the author's message: the demand for freedom, the longing for a better world, the power of action. The descriptions of nature were the most important source of inspiration. The extensive orchestral poem breaks up into nine sections, whose titles correspond to the names of the chapters in the book (but not always in the same order). Between these there are only three general pauses, the rest is in one go. As a motto he placed Nietzsche's "ode to the sun" with the call that "Too long have we dreamed of music, let us now wake up. We were sleepwalkers, let us now go out into the day..." The whole work begins with the sunrise: after long, grinding and very low C in double basses, double bassoon and organ, the sun breaks out in the notes C, G and C2. This is probably the most brilliant sunrise in the entire history of music, and just like Ligeti's music, it became the motif in the film 2001 – A Space Odyssey. The following parts have the titles: "About the inhabitants of the afterlife", "About the great longing" and "About the joy and passions", where the oboe intones a mournful melody. It is the dreams of youth that are buried. "The Night Wanderer's Song" is a heartbreaking farewell song where the description of nature returns in a reconciling C major in the basses. In the music, C major represents man and nature, while B major represents the universe - two keys that are very far apart. Neither of them emerges victorious from the battle at the end of the piece. Stig Jacobsson

The Gothenburg Symphony was formed in 1905 and today consists of 109 musicians. The orchestra's base is Gothenburg Concert Hall at Götaplatsen that has gathered music lovers since 1935. Since the 2019-2020 season, Barbara Hannigan is Principal guest conductor. We are also a proud partner of Barbara Hannigan's Equilibrium mentoring program focusing on young singers at the start of their careers. The title Principal Guest Conductor is shared by Pekka Kuusisto from 2025. Wilhelm Stenhammar was the orchestra's chief conductor from 1907 to 1922. He gave the orchestra a strong Nordic profile and invited colleagues Carl Nielsen and Jean Sibelius to the orchestra. Under the direction of conductor Neeme Järvi from 1982-2004, the orchestra made a series of international tours as well as a hundred disc recordings and established themselves among Europe's leading orchestras. In 1996, the Swedish Riksdag appointed the Gothenburg Symphony as Sweden's National Orchestra. In recent decades, the orchestra has had prominent chief conductors such as Santtu-Matias Rouvali, Mario Venzago and Gustavo Dudamel, following Kent Nagano as Principal Guest conductor. Anna-Karin Larsson is CEO and artistic director, Gustavo Dudamel honorary conductor and Neeme Järvi chief conductor emeritus. The orchestra's owner is the Västra Götaland Region. The Gothenburg Symphony works regularly with conductors such as Herbert Blomstedt, Joana Carneiro, Jukka-Pekka Saraste, Christian Zacharias and Anja Bihlmaier.

Soprano and conductor Barbara Hannigan is Principal Guest Conductor of the Gothenburg Symphony since 2019. Embodying music with an unparalleled dramatic sensibility, Barbara Hannigan's pioneering work was rewarded with the Polar Muisc Prize 2025. Her artistic colleagues include John Zorn, Krszysztof Warlikowski, Simon Rattle, Sasha Waltz, Kent Nagano, Vladimir Jurowski, Andreas Kriegenburg, Andris Nelsons, Esa Pekka Salonen, Christoph Marthaler, Antonio Pappano, Katie Mitchell, and Kirill Petrenko. The late conductor and pianist Reinbert de Leeuw has been an extraordinary influence and inspiration on her development as a musician. The Grammy Award winning Canadian musician has shown a profound commitment to the music of our time and has given the world première performances of nearly 100 new creations. Hannigan has collaborated extensively with composers including Boulez, Zorn, Dutilleux, Ligeti, di Castri, Stockhausen, Khayam, Sciarrino, Barry, Dusapin, Dean, Benjamin and Abrahamsen. A passionate musician of unique and courageous choices, Hannigan is renowned for creating innovative orchestral programs, combining new and older repertoire. In recent years she has been conducting world class orchestras including the Concertgebouw and Cleveland Orchestras, Montreal Symphony, Rome's Accademmia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia, has ongoing relationships with festivals including Aix en Provence and Spoleto, and has had starring soprano roles on opera stages including London's Covent Garden, Teatro San Carlo in Naples, Paris Opera's Palais Garnier, New York's Lincoln Center, and the opera houses of Berlin, Hamburg and Munich. The past few seasons have brought a new presentation of Poulenc's opera La Voix Humaine, and recent world premieres include Golfam Khayam's I am not a tale to be told with Iceland Symphony Orchestra, John Zorn's Split the Lark and Star Catcher, Zosha di Castri's In the Half Light with the Toronto and Montreal Symphony Orchestras, new works by Sandström and Sciarrino, and a project with pianists Katia and Marielle Labeque inspired by the life and music of Hildegard von Bingen with new music from David Chalmin and Bryce Dessner. In the 2024-2025 season with the Gothenburg Symphony she performed the program Americana, which depicts USA in the making, as well as Mozart's Requiem and Berg's Violin Concerto with Veronica Eberle. She performed chamber music by Schönberg, Fauré and Chausson. She also guested London Symphony, Munich Philharmonic, Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France, Danish Radio Symphony Orchestra, Iceland Symphony, l'Orchestre de Chambre de Lausanne and Kollegium Musicum WInterthur. In 2026 she will take the helm of Iceland Symphony Orchestra as their chief conductor and artistic director. Barbara’s commitment to the younger generation of musicians led her to create the mentoring initiatives Equilibrium Young Artists (2017), and Momentum: our Future Now (2020), both initiatives offering both guidance and performing opportunities to young professional artists. She was recently named the Reinbert de Leeuw Professor of Music at London's Royal Academy of Music and has been visiting professor at the Juilliard School in New York. On record, Barbara Hannigan’s fruitful relationship with Alpha Classics began in 2017 with the release of Crazy Girl Crazy, winning a Grammy and a Juno. More critically-acclaimed recordings followed, including Vienna: fin de siècle with pianist Reinbert de Leeuw, La Passione featuring works by Nono, Haydn and Grisey and Infinite Voyage, joining her colleagues of the Emerson String Quartet. In 2024 she released the ecstatic vocal works of Messiaen with pianist Bertrand Chamayou and a live recording of John Zorn’s compositions with pianist Stephen Gosling. Barbara Hannigan resides in Finistère, on the northwest coast of France.