Jukka-Pekka Saraste conducts Say and Brahms — With Fazıl Say

World-renowned pianist Fazıl Say, a self-described "composer of programmatic music, one who loves to tell stories through sound," performs the Finnish premiere of his soul-stirring piano concerto Mother Earth with the Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra and Jukka-Pekka Saraste. Completed in 2025, the atmospheric seven-movement Mother Earth presents an urgent wake-up call for climate awareness, evoking nature's indescribable beauty alongside its latent forces of destruction that our action (or lack thereof) threatens to unleash. Maestro Saraste pairs this timely new work with a Romantic-era treasure: Brahms's haunting, supremely elegant Symphony No. 4 in E minor, inspired by a stay in the Austrian Alps. Composed with a remarkable economy of material, the Fourth takes on its extraordinary richness and emotional weight through the ingenuity of the composer's textural and contrapuntal techniques, what Schoenberg would later call Brahms's "developing variation."

Photo © Fethi Karaduman