May 15-17: World Premiere of Anna Thorvaldsdottir’s Cello Concerto Performed by Johannes Moser & the San Francisco Symphony Conducted by Dalia Stasevska
Photo by Anna Maggy. High resolution photos available here.
World Premiere of Anna Thorvaldsdottir’s Cello Concerto
Before we fall
Performed by Cellist Johannes Moser & the San Francisco Symphony
Conducted by Dalia Stasevska
May 15, 16, and 17, 2025 at 7:30pm
Davies Symphony Hall | 201 Van Ness Ave. | San Francisco, CA
Tickets & Information: http://sfsymphony.org/stasevska
“[Thorvaldsdottir] has carved her own corner in contemporary music by creating symphonic works of sustained brilliance” – The Times
San Francisco, CA – Composer Anna Thorvaldsdottir’s highly anticipated cello concerto, Before we fall, will have its world premiere performances on May 15, 16, and 17, 2025 at 7:30pm, performed by cello soloist Johannes Moser and the San Francisco Symphony led by conductor Dalia Stasevska at Davies Symphony Hall (201 Van Ness Ave.), paired with Ralph Vaughan Williams’s Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis and Sibelius’s Symphony No. 5. The new concerto is written for Moser and co-commissioned by the San Francisco Symphony, BBC Proms, Iceland Symphony Orchestra, Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra, and Odense Symphony Orchestra.
Anna Thorvaldsdottir’s striking sound world has made her “one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary music” (NPR). Speaking to Alex Ross of The New Yorker, Esa-Pekka Salonen said of her music, “She has identity, voice, a unique sound world. Her clear sense of form counterbalances her complex textures. And she can create breathtaking moments of real emotion.” The Guardian reports, “Anna Thorvaldsdottir’s natural instrument is the symphony orchestra, but in her hands it is reborn as a natural organism.”
Her unique command of the orchestra on vivid display, the concerto carries Thorvaldsdottir's signature “combination of power and intimacy” (Gramophone) yet also distinctively expands her oeuvre. A cellist herself, Anna writes of the new piece:
“The core inspiration behind Before we fall centres around the notion of teetering on the edge, of balancing on the verge of a multitude of opposites. The musical structure flows between lyricism and a sense of distorted energy – two main forces that stabilise this entropic pull. Driven by the strong sense of lyricism that permeates the piece, the work also orbits a forward-moving energy that connects and balances the opposites in different ways. The stable fundament – a grounding power of sustained harmonic presence – communicates with ethereal and distorted sounds, together providing the earth for the essence of the solo cello, the structure upon which it stands and within which it moves. The cello, both alone and deeply connected to the orchestral elements in its expression, generates the atmospheric progression of the world it inhabits, yet continuously on the verge of falling outside the reality it is building for itself.
As with my music generally, the inspiration is not something I am trying to describe through the music or what the music is ‘about,’ as such. Inspiration is a way to intuitively tap into parts of the core energy, structure, atmosphere and material of the music I am writing each time. It is a fuel for the musical ideas to come into existence, a tool to approach and work with the fundamental materials, the ideas and sensations, that provide and generate the initial spark to the music – the various sources of inspiration are ultimately effective because I perceive qualities in them that I find musically captivating. I do often spend quite a bit of time finding ways to articulate some of the important elements of the musical ideas or thoughts that play certain key roles in the origin of each piece but the music itself does not emerge from a verbal place, it emerges as a stream of consciousness that flows, is felt, sensed, shaped and then crafted. So inspiration is a part of the origin story of a piece, but in the end the music stands on its own.”
Her other large orchestral works AERIALITY (2011), METACOSMOS (2017), AIŌN (2018), CATAMORPHOSIS (2020), and ARCHORA (2022) continue to receive country and local premieres as well as repeat performances throughout the world, and are all recorded on the Sono Luminus label.
Anna Thorvaldsdottir’s current season includes performances of her music across at least nineteen countries including Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, England, Finland, France, Germany, Iceland, Italy, Mexico, The Netherlands, Norway, Scotland, Sweden, Switzerland, the United States, and Wales. The current schedule of performances of Anna’s music is available on her website.
Other highlights for Anna this season include serving as the Tonhalle-Orchester Zürich’s Creative Chair. Since 2015, the orchestra has invited a composer to hold this position each season, including, formerly, Arvo Pärt, Esa-Pekka Salonen, John Adams, and Toshio Hosokawa, among others. From September 2024 to June 2025, a wide variety of Anna’s music is being performed, ranging from string quartets to large orchestral pieces. The season-opening concerts in September featured ARCHORA, conducted by music director Paavo Järvi. Two of Anna’s orchestral works received their Swiss premieres – CATAMORPHOSIS at the Sonic Matter Festival Zurich conducted by André de Ridder on November 29 and METACOSMOS conducted by Eva Ollikainen on April 3 and 4.
Additionally, Anna continues her two-year period as one of ten CHANEL Next Prize winners. The biennial prize is awarded to ten international contemporary artists who are redefining their chosen discipline. Each artist embodies CHANEL’s mission to advance the new and the next and receives €100,000 in funding, allowing them to fully realize their most ambitious artistic projects. The NEXT Prize was established in 2021 as part of the CHANEL Culture Fund, CHANEL’s global initiative to accelerate the ideas that advance culture, extending the House’s century-long legacy of cultural patronage.
The 2024-2025 season also brought a new album featuring Anna’s chamber work Ubique, which was released worldwide on Sono Luminus on February 28. The 45-minute piece was co-commissioned by Carnegie Hall, The Pnea Foundation, The Cheswatyr Foundation, and Kurt Chauviere for Claire Chase’s Claire Chase’s Density project. The world premiere was given in May 2023 at Carnegie Hall, performed by Claire Chase, flutes; Katinka Kleijn and Seth Parker Woods, cellos; Cory Smythe, piano; and Levy Lorenzo, live sound. The same musicians have recorded the new album, and will perform its West Coast premiere at the Ojai Festival in California on June 7. Anna writes of the piece, “Ubique lives on the border between enigmatic lyricism and atmospheric distortion. Through a combination of sounds, pitches, and textural nuances, low deep drones envelop lyrical materials and harmonies that breathe in and out of focus throughout the progress of the piece. The flow of the music is primarily guided by continuous expansion and contraction — of various kinds and durations — as it streams with subtle interruptions and frictions but ever moving forward in the overall structure.” Listen here.
Anna Thorvaldsdottir’s music is composed as much by sounds and nuances as by harmonies and lyrical material – it is written as an ecosystem of sounds, where materials continuously grow in and out of each other, often inspired in an important way by nature and its many qualities, in particular structural ones, like proportion and flow. Her work is frequently performed internationally and has been commissioned by many of the world’s leading orchestras, ensembles, and arts organizations, including the Berlin Philharmonic, New York Philharmonic, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Orchestre de Paris, City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra, Munich Philharmonic, Ensemble Intercontemporain, Danish String Quartet, International Contemporary Ensemble, BBC Proms, and Carnegie Hall. Her “detailed and powerful” (The Guardian) orchestral writing has garnered her awards from the New York Philharmonic, Lincoln Center, the Nordic Council, and the UK’s Ivors Academy. Anna was Composer-in-Residence with the Iceland Symphony Orchestra from 2018-2023, and was in 2023 also in residence at the Aldeburgh Festival and the Tanglewood Festival of Contemporary Music. She holds a PhD from the University of California in San Diego, and is currently based in the London area. All of Anna Thorvaldsdottir’s orchestral music and many of her other works are recorded on the Sono Luminus label, and featured on Apple Music’s Anna Thorvaldsdottir Essentials Playlist. The music of Anna Thorvaldsdottir is published by Chester Music, part of Wise Music Group. For more information: www.annathorvalds.com/bio
Hailed by Gramophone Magazine as “one of the finest among the astonishing gallery of young virtuoso cellists,” German-Canadian cellist Johannes Moser has performed with the world’s leading orchestras such as the Berliner Philharmoniker, New York Philharmonic, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Chicago Symphony, BBC Philharmonic at the Proms, London Symphony, Symphonieorchester des Bayerischen Rundfunks, Koninklijk Concertgebouworkest, Tonhalle Orchestra Zurich, Tokyo NHK Symphony, Philadelphia and Cleveland orchestras with conductors of the highest level including Riccardo Muti, Lorin Maazel, Mariss Jansons, Valery Gergiev, Zubin Mehta, Vladimir Jurowski, Franz Welser-Möst, Christian Thielemann, Pierre Boulez, Paavo Järvi, Semyon Bychkov, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, and Gustavo Dudamel. His recordings include the concertos by Dvořák, Lalo, Elgar, Lutosławski, Dutilleux, Tchaikovsky, Thomas Olesen and Fabrice Bollon (electric cello), which have gained him the prestigious Preis der Deutschen Schallplattenkritik and the Diapason d’Or. Johannes is renowned for his efforts to expand the reach of the classical genre to all audiences, and his passionate involvement in commissioning new works for his instrument. He performs on an Andrea Guarneri Cello from 1694 from a private collection. For more information about Johannes Moser: www.johannes-moser.com/biography-english