CANCELLED: Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra / Xavier de Maistre

The premiere date of this solo concerto will make you look twice. For Reinhold Glière’s harp concerto, written in 1938, with its mixture of Viennese Classicism and Russian Romanticism, sounds like it was written long before that date with dreamy, fairytale to folksy melodies and no trace of atonality. To make the piece as meaningful and effective as possible through special playing techniques, Glière, himself a violinist, enlisted the support of harpist Ksenia Alexandrovna Erdeli.

The virtuoso helped him so much that once it was complete, Glière asked to publish the work under their two names. But Erdeli declined and was only named in the score as editor at her request. Before the emancipatory harp concert, the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra under the baton of Nathalie Stutzmann will play the prelude from the second act of Carl Nielsen’s opera Saul and David, a real rarity with which the Dane made his opera debut in 1902.