Eva Ollikainen
Maria Angelika Carlsen Bjørn Kruse
Ludwig van Beethoven

Bjørn Kruse (b. 1946) composed the violin concerto Unfolding Moments for Maria Angelika Carlsen, a violinist with the Oslo Philharmonic and the soloist in tonight’s world premiere. The title refers to a compositional process in which a musical idea continuously unfolds. The composer writes:

“A moment can be a sound, a rhythmic pattern, a fragment of a melody, or a short harmonic progression. The unfolding of these musical situations reveals new ones while preserving the original character. The violin part ties everything together—first emerging from the material, then growing out of it, commenting on it, and ultimately breaking free from it.”

Ludwig van Beethoven (1770–1827) sketched his Symphony No. 5 in 1804 and composed it alongside his Sixth Symphony. Both works premiered on the same evening in Vienna, just before Christmas in 1808—a bitterly cold night featuring both the summer-like Pastoral Symphony and the dramatic Fate Symphony.

Two years later, the writer E.T.A. Hoffmann hailed Beethoven’s Fifth as a milestone in music history, a status it has retained ever since. “Beethoven’s music evokes terror, fear, reverence, and pain, awakening the infinite longing that is the essence of Romanticism.”