Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra / Liu / Bancroft

Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s »Theme and Variations« opens an evening in which musical transformation and stark contrasts feature time and again. The Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra performs under the baton of Ryan Bancroft.

Virtuoso and versatile
Sergei Rachmaninoff, too, uses »Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini«, he too uses a familiar melody as the starting point for an ever-changing series of variations. The soloist is the Canadian pianist Bruce Liu, who won the prestigious Chopin Competition in Warsaw in 2021. His playing combines virtuosity with elegance, a rich palette of tones and a keen sense of surprising twists.

Between jubilation and temperament
After the interval, Benjamin Staerns’ »Jubilate« captures both the jubilation of large crowds and its flip side: noise, aggression and destruction. Musically, the Swedish composer juxtaposes contrasts such as tonal and atonal, loud and soft, or organic and mechanical. Four very different characters ultimately define Carl Nielsen’s Second Symphony »The Four Temperaments«: the choleric, the phlegmatic, the melancholic and the sanguine. Nielsen was inspired by an exaggerated portrayal of these four types that he saw in a pub. From this series of images, which was initially met with derision, he developed an entire symphony in which each movement gives one of the four temperaments its own musical profile.