It started with a handful of students in the old concert hall in Gothenburg's Heden park. Today, a hundred years later, students from all over the world study at the Orchestra programmes at The Academy of Music and Drama in Gothenburg, where they play with some of the best teachers and conductors in the field of classical music. The anniversary is celebrated with a big concert on Friday 7 October.
Lecture, 6 PM. Free entry, no bookings required.
Concert, 7 PM. Admission: SEK 100/60. Children under 12 years admitted free
Elfrida Andrée: Concert Overture in D Major
Wilhelm Stenhammar: Concerto for Piano and Orchestra No. 2
Olivier Messiaen: Les offrandes oubliées
Igor Stravinsky: The Firebird, suite (1919)
Music by Stravinsky and Messiaen, two of the 20th century's most important international composers, performed alongside works by two important Gothenburg figures. In 1916, composer and conductor Wilhelm Stenhammar founded the orchestra school Göteborgs Orkesterskola, which laid the foundation for the current Symphonic Orchestra Performance Programme offered at the Academy of Music and Drama. Elfrida Andrée, Sweden's first-ever female organist to play inside a cathedral, and also its first-ever female telegraph operator, was both an important local figure in Gothenburg and a prominent advocate of gender equality.
University of Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra
Conductor: Henrik Schaefer
Soloist: Bernt Wilhelmsson, piano
The evening kicks off with the series Artistically Speaking; this time in the form of a lecture by Anders Carlsson, PhD in Musicology, entitled Commerce and Bacchus or Handel and Bach? Gothenburg - nothing more than a tradesman's town, or a bastion of culture, too? An historical exposé of a bygone era that laid the foundation for the music scene in modern Gothenburg.