— A grand finale in Håkonshallen.

We are proud to conclude this summer's new venture in Håkonshallen on a high note: Pianist Håkon Austbø has influenced Norwegian music life for nearly sixty years, and his concert in University Aula in Bergen earlier this year confirmed his position as one of our top artists.

We have invited him to shine in Håkonshallen itself. The audience can look forward to hearing his interpretations of Schumann's brilliant Kreisleriana, Beethoven's Pathétique sonata and the last work in sonata form composed by Aleksandr Skrjabin — where Austbø is perhaps among our foremost interpreters. Welcome to the master final in the atmospheric Håkonshallen.

Håkon Austbø piano

Duration approximately 1 hour and 30 minutes including interval.

• Programme — 'Revolution'

  Ludwig van Beethoven (1770—1827)
  Piano Sonata No. 8 in C minor, Op. 13 'Pathétique'

  Alexander Scriabin (1871—1915)
  Piano Sonata No. 10, Op. 70

  Robert Schumann (1810—1856)
  Kreisleriana, op. 16

• About the performer

  Håkon Austbø has been active as a pianist for over 50 years. His first appearances were as a soloist with the Harmonien in Bergen in 1963 and his debut concert in University Aula in Oslo in 1964. He was only 15 years old at the time, and his debut attracted great attention. Since then, he has established a central position in Norwegian and international music life. He is perhaps best known as an interpreter of Olivier Messiaen, with whom he worked closely and thus became one of the few to pass on first-hand knowledge of his style. He has also been one of the most ardent champions of Alexander Scriabin's music. Typically, both of these composers were concerned with color, something Austbø has made an important part of his work, by promoting the first authentic performance of the color part in Scriabin's Prometheus in the Netherlands in the 1990s, and now preparing new color parts for Messiaen's works.

  As his work with color crosses over to the visual arts, Austbø has crossed boundaries long before interdisciplinary became a fashionable term. He worked with poets (Claes Gill), actors (Juni Dahr), choreographers (Jiri Kylián), jazz musicians (Bengt Hallberg), often in completely innovative forms. In addition to Messiaen, he worked with numerous composers, such as Arne Nordheim, Peter Schat, Elliott Carter and Rolf Wallin.

  In his search for the innermost core of music, he also encounters the classics with new eyes. In 2013-15, he led the research project The Thinking Musician at the Norwegian Academy of Music, a project that searches for the driving forces behind genuinely personal interpretations of the classics, freed from the ballast of tradition. In 2021, he published the autobiographical book Motstrøms , where his thoughts on these things also find space.

• Programme note — by Håkon Austbø

  The three composers in this program had in common that they were each in their own way revolutionary. Beethoven, a self-proclaimed revolutionary, used Schiller's verse "Be embraced, millions!" in his 9th symphony, which in his time was a revolutionary message. But he carried out his real revolution in his music by creating a completely new tonal language in which the dramatic structure of the work depends entirely on a few building blocks, so-called motifs. He had already established the uncompromising use of this principle in the Pathétique sonata, where all the material is presented in the first bars of the slow introduction. He wrote the work when he was 27 years old, and the principle was to characterize almost all the music that came after him.

  Scriabin was revolutionary in a very different way. His music is also built on motifs, but with him they are — rather than dramatic building blocks — parts of a network of voices that form imaginary landscapes; they are colored by the harmonies that he developed and which he freed from their tonal context. In this sonata, his last, this is a landscape populated by insects, a kind of surreal elsewhere.

  Robert Schumann was also politically committed against the philistine bourgeoisie, but his real revolution came from within, from the madness that he had to fight and that found expression in masterpieces such as Kreisleriana. A triple madness: Kapellmeister Johannes Kreisler was the incarnation of the crazy, romantic artist, described in several of ETA Hoffmann's stories — he in turn an extremely eccentric writer (and composer). By writing through this figure, Schumann managed to stave off the threatening insanity that would nevertheless overtake him at the end of his life. But by then he had also accomplished a musical upheaval.

  — Håkon Austbø (August 2025)

We wish you an enjoyable, unique concert experience with us. Welcome!

Photo: Ivan Tostrup