Berlioz: Symphonie Fantastique

– energetic and passionate

Conductor: Adam Hickox
Soloist, piano: Kirill Gerstein

Program
Igor Stravinsky: Feu d'artifice (Fireworks)
Thomas Adès: Concerto for piano and orchestra
Hector Berlioz: Symphonie Fantastique

About the concert
Adam Hickox and the TSO invite you to another star-studded evening, full of fireworks, dancing piano playing and musical horror visions. And we are so lucky to finally have world-famous piano star Kirill Gerstein with us and the Norwegian premiere of Thomas Ades' playful piano concerto.

We open the concert with Stravinsky's Feu d'artifice (Fireworks) , a colorful fanfare full of exuberant energy, which lays the foundation for what is to come.

Ades and Gerstein have collaborated for many years and Ades' Concerto for Piano and Orchestra was written for Gerstein. He impresses in this concerto which is both sparklingly elegant, virtuosic and expressive, and he masters every aspect to the tips of his fingers, naturally and unaffectedly, in a concerto which has been described as a "dance with traditions".

Berlioz's mighty Symphonie Fantastique is the very first instrumental drama in music history, as Berlioz himself called it, in which the music is accompanied by an explanatory program text. The symphony tells the story of a young musician with heartbreak who, in an opium intoxication, encounters increasingly distorted and terrifying visions. A wonderfully colorful work for a large orchestra that revolutionized the traditional symphony.