Salonen to Conduct Nobel Prize Concert

The front side of a Nobel Prize medal (from its Wikipedia page, photograph by Jonathunder, public domain)

For those that may be unaware of the matter, the Nobel Prizes are awarded every year on December 10 in Stockholm. Those ceremonies have usually been preceded by other major international events; and since 2005 one of those events has been the Nobel Prize Concert, which takes place in the Konserthuset Stockholm (the same venue for the award ceremony). This year the concert will be conducted by San Francisco Symphony (SFS) Music Director Esa-Pekka Salonen.

Salonen has prepared a program with a “California connection.” The program will conclude Gabriella Smith’s “Tumblebird Contrails,” which was inspired by the diverse environments that the composer encountered while backpacking in Point Reyes. This music was first heard in Davies Symphony Hall in March of 2022, when it was performed by the San Francisco Symphony Youth Orchestra. Salonen added the composition to the SFS repertoire about a year later at the beginning of this past March. This month will mark the work’s Swedish premiere.

The concerto portion of the program will be Johannes Brahms’ Opus 77, his violin concerto in D major. The soloist will be Julia Fischer. Unless I am mistaken, her last appearance in Davies took place in March of 2014, when she performed Serge Prokofiev’s Opus 19 violin concerto with Michael Tilson Thomas on the podium. The program will also include the second suite that Maurice Ravel extracted from the score for the ballet “Daphnis et Chloé” (which the composer called a “choreographic symphony”). The remaining work on the program will be Luciano Berlo’s “Quattro versioni originali della ‘Ritirata notturna di Madrid,’” (four original versions from Luigi Boccherini's “Withdrawal by Night in Madrid”), which Salonen conducted in Davies in June of 2022.

For those not inclined to purchase airline tickets to Stockholm, the entire program will be livestreamed. It will be available for viewing on a YouTube Web page that is part of the Nobel Foundations’s YouTube channel. The stream will begin at 10 a.m. on Friday, December 8.