Poème Symphonique

Three short piano concertos in one evening — each connecting past and present. In Credo, Arvo Pärt takes up the famous C major Prelude from Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier, pitting avant-garde compositional techniques against tonality and triads. György Kurtág — who turns 100 in February 2026 — takes inspiration from the freely unfolding design of Beethoven’s Piano Sonatas, Op. 27, in his fascinating spatial composition . . . quasi una fantasia . . ., which distributes the instruments around the audience. And Thomas Adès, who will himself conduct the Mahler Chamber Orchestra in his dazzling Concerto Conciso, flirts with jazz, blues, and Baroque dance. In America — A Prophecy, by contrast, he unfolds a dark vision of destruction involving the fall of Mayan culture at the hands of the Spanish conquistadors, with a soprano as the prophetic witness. Before all that, the concert opens with 100 ticking metronomes in György Ligeti’s Poème Symphonique, where they come to a stop one by one, until silence prevails. When the last metronome stops, “it feels like the end of life itself,” says Víkingur Ólafsson.

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