Symphonyconcert02

Honouring Jean Sibelius’s 150th birthday, the second symphony concert directs our attention towards Scandinavia, presenting us as well with two of the Finnish composer’s particularly passionate countrymen. Olli Mustonen likes to take musical risks with his piano playing. “He is someone,” says music journalist Harald Eggebrecht, “who has in store surprises, intensities, amazements in a way that is no everyday occurrence in the music business.” Including in seemingly well-known works such as Grieg’s piano concerto, with its melancholy Norwegian inflection. Mustonen is convinced that “Each performance must have the freshness of a premiere.” This makes him an ideal partner for the conductor Hannu Lintu, about whom the critic Volker Tarnow judged: “His art consists not merely of planning sounds ahead of time, but of creating them at the very moment of performance.” Hannu Lintu, currently principal conductor of the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra, among other roles, will bring along the epic “Lemminkäinen” Suite by the jubilarian Sibelius: four tone poems based on the Finnish national epic “Kalevala”. One of them, “The Swan of Tuonela”, made the composer famous around the world.