Gerstein & Storgårds

John Storgårds

Beginning his musical career as a violinist, John Storgårds served as the leader of many orchestras in Finland and abroad before qualifying as a conductor at the Sibelius Academy. He still continues his violinist career as a soloist and in chamber ensembles.

John Storgårds began his conducting career with the Helsinki University Symphony Orchestra from 1992 to 1996, the year in which he was appointed Artistic Director of the Lapland Chamber Orchestra – a post he still holds. From 2003 to 2008 he was Principal Guest Conductor of the Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra and from 2008 to 2015 its 12th Chief Conductor. He has also held regular conducting posts in Oulu, Tapiola and Tampere.

Now Chief Guest Conductor of the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra (2012–) and Principal Guest Conductor of the National Arts Centre Ottawa (2015–). He makes regular guest conducting appearances with, among other, the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, the St. Louis and Chicago Symphony Orchestras.

Highlights of the 2021/2022 season include guest conducting appearances with the Helsinki, Turku and Lahti orchestras, the Copenhagen Philharmonic, Stuttgart Radio Symphony and Munich Philharmonic. John Storgårds makes his conducting debut with the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra in June 2022.

John Storgårds has released many discs as both violinist and conductor, including the complete Sibelius and Nielsen Symphonies with the BBCPO, and Symphonies 2, 4, 5 & 6 by Per Nørgård with the Oslo Philharmonic. The disc featuring him as the soloist in the Violin Concerto by Pēteris Vasks won the Cannes Classical Disc of the Year Award in 2004.

His principal violin teacher was Chaim Taub.

Follow John Storgårds on Twitter: @johnstorgards

Kirill Gerstein

One of the world’s great pianists, Kirill Gerstein (born in Voronezh, Russia in 1979) has been the soloist with leading orchestras the world over since winning the Tel Aviv Piano Competition in 2001 and the highly prestigious Gilmore Artist Award in 2010. He is, further, somewhat unusual in that he is also an active jazz musician, having studied jazz at the Berklee School of Music in Boston (the youngest ever student to be accepted for its jazz option at the age of 14) in addition to classical at Tanglewood, with Dmitri Bashkirov in Madrid and Ferenc Rados in Budapest. After much soul-searching, he decided when he was 16 to make classical his career. The Brahms Piano Concertos occupy a very special place in his repertoire. The first, he says, is not just beautiful; it is also an “introspective recollection of the Schumann spirit”. Gerstein has previously performed with the HPO at the Helsinki Music Centre in 2016, 2018 and 2019.

Anton Webern: Four Pieces for Violin and Piano, Op. 7

A new era dawned in music when Anton Webern (1883–1945) began studying with Arnold Schönberg in 1904. Together with Alban Berg, they sought to break away from tonality in favour of a system, dodecaphony, based on the equality of all 12 notes in the scale. Webern was the most radical of the three. His aim was to crystallise his message in tiny aphorisms, saying more in two minutes than most composers in ten. The Four Pieces for Violin and Piano of 1910 are atonal (i.e. they have no clear tonal centre or ‘home key’) but not yet dodecaphonic, and together they last only four minutes (slow–quick–slow–quick) in performance. Each note is equipped with a sign indicating how it is to be played, but rather than restricting the musicians, this allows both them and the listener to concentrate on one note at a time.

Johannes Brahms: Piano Concerto No. 1

On 27 February 1854, Robert Schumann tried to drown himself in the Rhine; the very next day, Johannes Brahms (1833–1897) wrote the first bars of what would, five years later, be his first orchestral work, his Piano Concerto No. 1. Robert and his pianist wife Clara were his great friends and mentors, and Brahms basked in Clara’s admiration. He began composing a sonata for two pianos, maybe with a view to performing it with her. Over the next year or so, the idea of writing a symphony grew, but he made little progress and almost gave up until one night in 1855, he dreamt he was the soloist in a performance of his symphony and realised it was meant to be a concerto. It was nearly finished when Robert died in 1856; Brahms rejected the concerto and threw out the second and third movements. The first, expressing the emotions aroused by his friend’s attempted suicide, remained. For the second he composed an Adagio, a love letter to Clara, and for the finale a Rondo tribute to Beethoven and his third piano concerto. The D-minor concerto is unusually symphonic for a 19th-century concerto and the piano is never allowed to show off simply for the sake of it.

Anton Webern: Five Pieces for Orchestra, Op. 10

By about 1900, Romanticism had run its course. Its overblown sentimentality, artist heroes and grand effects had reached saturation point, and change was inevitable. In the hands of the Second Viennese School composers – Schönberg, Webern and Berg – the massive gave way to the microscopic. For Anton Webern, focusing on one tone colour at a time became more important than creating a great drama. The Five Pieces for Orchestra of 1911 are an extreme example of his infinitely-condensed info pack in which the rests are as vital as the notes. Every sound is unique, lighting up and snuffing out before the ear has even had time to really catch it. Each piece might be conceived of as an abstract of a full story that will never be told.

Johannes Brahms: Piano Concerto No. 2

By the time Johannes Brahms came to compose his Piano Concerto No. 2, decades had passed since the first and he no longer needed to prove himself as a composer. He now had a host of major, large-scale works under his belt, and the orchestra had replaced the piano as his main instrument.

The concerto took him three years to write (1878–1881), and if the first was a ‘symphonic concerto’, then the second was a ‘genuine symphony with a big piano part’. And it has four movements instead of the usual three. “I have composed a tiny little concerto with a pretty little Scherzo,” he wrote to his former love Clara Schumann, adding that it needed a Scherzo to counterbalance the bland first movement. He was, of course, joking, because never before had a bigger or more difficult concerto been composed.

The concerto is an architectural masterpiece, a work lasting three-quarters of an hour and built on a motif only a few bars long presented on a solo French horn right at the beginning. The passionate Scherzo is an offshoot of the same root, and the third movement begins with one of the most beautiful cello solos in all concerto history. Brahms later used the melody for his song Immer leiser wird mein Schlummer. The closing Rondo is light and airy.