— 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 break.

• Programme

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

  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.

Welcome to a unique musical experience!

Photo: Ivan Tostrup