Stanislav Kochanovsky
Louisa Tuck Nikolai Myaskovsky
Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov

Soloist Truls Mørk has to cancel his performance due to a muscle injury. Oslo Philharmonic's Louisa Tuck is the soloist in Myaskovsky’s Cello Concerto.

Several of the most well-known works by Modest Mussorgsky (1839–1881) are inspired by Russian history. The opera Khovanshchina is about a political uprising led by Prince Ivan Khovansky in 1682 that is directed at Tsarist attempts to westernise Russia. At this concert two orchestral excerpts will be played: Dawn over the Moscow River, which introduces the opera, and the interlude Dance of the Persian Slaves. Mussorgsky worked on the opera for eight years but didn’t manage to orchestrate it. Later, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov and Dmitri Shostakovich, among others, did.

Nicolai Myaskovsky (1881–1950) went to military school and trained as an engineer before beginning to study composition. He was the oldest student in his class at the Saint Petersburg Conservatory and he became close friends with the youngest, Sergei Prokofiev, who was ten years younger. Even though he was a late starter, in the interwar period Myaskovsky was considered one of the leading composers both in the Soviet Union as well as internationally. He wrote his Cello Concerto during the war in 1944–45 and today it is his most popular work.

Innumerable artists have been inspired by both the stories in One Thousand and One Nights and its frame story in which the brave and creative Scheherazade tells story after story in order not to be killed by the King. The orchestral work Scheherazade (1888), by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov (1844–1908), is the most famous musical example of this. The composer wanted to depict an atmosphere rather than focus on particular stories, but the two main characters clearly stand out right from the beginning in which Scheherazade is portrayed by a solo violin.