Brahms' Last Symphony: Stavanger Symfonieorkester

Witold Lutosławski (1913-94) visited Stavanger in his time as a composer profile during the Chamber Music Festival. His piano concertofrom 1987/88, thus belongs to his late works. In the same year that the piano concerto was created, he stated that "music belongs to the arts which do not do justice to the visible, but which should rather convey something of the invisible world, an ideal world, a world that we yearn for". The piano concerto was commissioned by the Salzburg Festival and is dedicated to the great Polish pianist Krystian Zimerman. Lutosławski does not experiment with the genre here; rather, we are reserved for the great piano concertos of Brahms, Chopin, Rachmaninov and Bartók. We are, so to speak, taken on a journey into the past, but without any nostalgia. The piano definitely plays the main role in this four-movement work. It begins with the purest tonal magic, then swings…