Archive

Here you can find almost anything about all the concerts Gothenburg Symphony has played over the years, both in the Concert Hall and on tour. Search for conductors, soloists and other artists that has played together with us. Or search for composers and music that we have played. And filter on specific seasons. Guesting orchestras and ensembles are also included in the archive. The result is presented by season.

40 concerts

2021-09-10 18:00 Stora salen

Göteborgs Symfoniker

Programme

Nielsen Saga-Drøm 9 min

Vasks Violin Concerto No .1 "Distant lLight" 31 min

Sibelius Symphony No 3 32 min

Participants

Vadim Gluzman Violin

2021-09-09 19:30 Stora salen

Göteborgs Symfoniker

Programme

Nielsen Saga-Drøm 9 min

Liszt Piano Concerto No. 1 19 min

Sibelius Symphony No 3 32 min

Participants

Yuja Wang piano

2021-09-08 19:30 Stora salen

Göteborgs Symfoniker

Programme

Nielsen Saga-Drøm 9 min

Liszt Piano Concerto No. 1 19 min

Sibelius Symphony No 3 32 min

Participants

Yuja Wang piano

2020-09-17 20:00 Endast GSOPlay

Göteborgs Symfoniker

Programme

Shostakovich Symphony No. 9 27 min

Sibelius Symphony No 3 30 min

Sibelius The Bard 7 min

Participants

Jukka-Pekka Saraste Conductor

2020-01-16 19:30 Stora salen

Göteborgs Symfoniker

Programme

R Strauss Don Juan 19 min

Sibelius Symphony No 3 32 min

Sibelius Valse triste 5 min

Participants

Petra Kloo Vik host

2015-12-02 19:30 Stora salen

Göteborgs Symfoniker

Programme

Sibelius Symphony No. 3 31 min

Intermission 25 min

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."

Sibelius Symphony No. 7 25 min

Participants

Kent Nagano Conductor

2015-06-13 15:00 Stora salen

Göteborgs Symfoniker

Programme

Sibelius Symphony No 3 31 min

Nielsen Clarinet Concerto 23 min

Intermission 25 min

Initially, Sibelius believed this first symphony would be programmatic: a symphony telling of his homeland’s geology and the triumph of Christianity over paganism. But seven years after the success of his choral-orchestral work based Finnish folklore Kullervo, friends and critics were urging Sibelius to think in more rigorous symphonic terms. Finland, they argued, needed art that was more international than parochial – a symphony that stood its ground on musical terms alone. Such thinking would give the First Symphony its musical weight irrespective of political context. In his student days in Vienna and Berlin, Sibelius’s teachers had stressed the importance of working through musical themes – lathing them continuously until they were fit for purpose. Ultimately, Sibelius took that advice to a level that couldn’t have been anticipated. Already in this symphony, the composer was handling his material in a distinctive way. Its misty opening on a solitary clarinet doesn’t just prepare us for the shock of the movement’s fast-paced Allegro; it infiltrates the work’s musical ideas like nutrients in their soil. The shape of the clarinet’s theme can be detected in numerous fragments right up to the final bars. The fourth movement launches with a transfigured version of it on thrusting strings. That gesture speaks of another conceptual difference in Sibelius’s symphonic designs: his response to the colours and capabilities of instruments. In a departure from traditional Germanic symphonic argument (which would make sense on a piano), Sibelius allowed the particular colour of instruments and instrumental groups to shape the path of his music. The symphony’s opening clarinet solo presents one example. The long-held pedal notes in the slow Andante, and the pizzicatos of the Scherzo, two more. These led the critic Ernest Newman to conclude that ‘every page breathes of another manner of thought, another way of living, even another landscape.’ That ‘other way of living’ can be rationalized. The use of recitation – a note repeating itself, like something half-sung – has its roots in Finland’s runic singing tradition. Others have heard something distinctly Russian in the clarinet solo, in the fur-wrapped melancholy of the slow movement and in the feverish way in which the final Allegro molto erupts. It’s in this movement that we hear Sibelius at his most unique. The organic treatment of themes continues. But as part of that process, the movement appears to reconcile the symphony’s poles of energy and stasis in a way only Sibelius could have conceived: by tricking us into assuming the music is operating at one distinct velocity when it’s actually locked into another. Andrew Mellor, from Sibelius: Symphony 1 & En Saga; Rouvali & Göteborgs Symfoniker (Alpha, 2019)