Göteborgs Konserthus John Adams & Víkingur Ólafsson

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.

Pianist Víkingur Ólafsson's unique personality and strong musical convictions have taken the music world by storm and made him one of the most sought-after artists of our time. He has made unforgettable impressions with his albums of music by Philip Glass, Johann Sebastian Bach and Rameau/Debussy (Deutsche Grammophon). In the 2024-2025 season, Ólafsson was Artist-in-Residence at the Tonhalle Zürich and the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic, as well as Artist-in-Focus at the Vienna Musikverein. He toured Europe with The Cleveland Orchestra, London Philharmonic Orchestra and Tonhalle-Orchester Zürich, performed with the Berliner Philharmoniker at the BBC Proms and returned to the New York Philharmonic. In January 2025, he gave the world premiere of John Adams After the Fall with the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra, and in the spring of 2025 he explored Beethoven's Sonata No. 30 in solo concerts in the US and Europe. Ólafsson dedicated his entire 2023-2024 season to his world tour of the Goldberg Variations, performing the work on six continents, including at the Gothenburg Concert Hall. In 2025, he won a Grammy for Best Classical Instrumental Solo for his recording of the Goldberg Variations. He has also won the BBC Music Magazine Album of the Year and the Opus Klassik Solo Recording of the Year (twice).