Italian conductor Gianandrea Noseda has guested the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra only once before: at the Nobel Prize Concert of 2016 – a great success! At last he returns to the orchestra, having set up an exciting programme. Since 2017, Noseda is chief conductor of the National Symphony Orchestra in Washington DC. He is also a noted opera conductor.

The concert opens with Anton Webern’s orchestration of the sublime fugue from Johann Sebastian Bach’s A Musical Offering, composed over a theme by Frederick the Great. Then we welcome French pianist Lise de la Salle, who in 2017 made a celebrated debut at Konserthuset Stockholm in a recital concert. This time she is the soloist in Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 16 – one that is rarely performed among his piano concertos (Nos 20 and 21 are the most commonly heard in the repertoire). 

The programme’s Italian elements are represented by Ottorino Respighi’s The Birds from 1927 and Nino Rota’s third symphony from 1957. The Birds was based on music of the 17th and 18th centuries, music that in different ways depicts birds. Hence, the different parts of the piece have titles like The Dove, The Hen, The Nightingale and The Cuckoo.

Nino Rota is above all famed for his original musik to the films by Fellini, as well as for the music to the Godfather films part 1 and 2. His success as a film music composer no doubt has set the rest of his production to the background. He wrote three symphonies, and it’s the last one that is presented here. The energy and bite of this music may lead thoughts to Russian music, more precisely to Prokofiev. Rota’s Symphony No. 3 is an immediate and fascinating work.