Víkingur Ólafsson:
Beethoven's
Emperor
Concert

Unique guest soloist

“One thing is absolutely certain: Víkingur Ólafsson is not like other pianists,” wrote an enthusiastic Eystein Sandvik on NRK.no when the Icelandic star pianist visited the Opera in 2025. Aftenposten and Dagens Næringsliv agreed: this was a concert not to be missed. 

At that time, the Grammy‑winning pianist appeared alone on stage. Now he is joined by the musicians of the Opera Orchestra and Music Director Edward Gardner, as guest soloist in Beethoven’s Emperor Concerto. 

A rare and unique event … the major concert experience of the autumn.

– Eystein Sandvik, NRK.no 

Cannons and clavier 

It is ironic that one of the world’s most famous piano concertos, Beethoven’s Fifth, is today known as the Emperor Concerto. When Napoleon crowned himself emperor in 1804, Beethoven reacted with fury and struck out the dedication to him from the score of his monumental Eroica Symphony. Five years later, in 1809, Vienna was bombarded by Napoleon’s troops. Beethoven was no calmer then: “What a disturbing, savage life around me! Nothing but drums, cannons, men, misery of every kind!” 

The piano concerto he was working on was marked by a proud, martial character, and it later acquired the name Emperor Concerto from the pianist and publisher Johann Baptist Cramer. 

By the time the work was completed in 1811, Beethoven was too deaf to give the premiere himself. Since then, many of the world’s greatest pianists have left their mark on the concerto – and now Víkingur Ólafsson and the Opera Orchestra add their names to this history. 

Grieg on a grand scale 

In the second half of the concert, Edward Gardner and the Opera Orchestra have the stage to themselves. Over the past fifteen years, Gardner has established himself as an award-winning interpreter of Nordic music. The programme includes Edvard Grieg’s Lyric Suite, where Norwegian folk melodies are transformed into rich, mysterious orchestral colours – from shimmering bell sounds to the burlesque, fantastical troll procession of the finale. 

The work grows out of the lyrical piano pieces Grieg wrote towards the end of the nineteenth century, at a time when the piano was becoming a fixture in Norwegian homes. In 1894, Anton Seidl, music director of the New York Philharmonic, orchestrated four of these miniatures and presented them as the Norwegian Suite. Grieg appreciated the initiative but was not entirely satisfied. After Seidl’s death, he revised the orchestration in line with his own ideals – lighter, clearer and more rooted in folk character. 

The triumph of vital force 

In the midst of the First World War, Danish composer Carl Nielsen wrote his Fourth Symphony, his best-known work. He gave it the subtitle The Inextinguishable. The crisis was not only global; Nielsen’s own marriage was also falling apart. Even so, it was the force of life itself that lay at the heart of the symphony. At the top of the score, he wrote: “Music is life, and like life, inextinguishable.” 

The symphony is played without breaks, unfolding as a single, continuous stream of consciousness. Nielsen wanted to write music for everything that is in motion, everything that wants to live – while at the same time embracing life’s great contrasts. It is conventionally divided into four movements, but within this framework, nothing behaves as expected: Nielsen’s orchestration hurls itself from the wild and tempestuous to the lyrical and reconciled – all at once.