Edvard Grieg first met Percy Grainger in London in 1906 and the two became good friends, Grieg inviting the ‘Young Apollo’ to spend the summer of 1907 with him at Troldhaugen where they revised the famous Piano Concerto in A minor in preparation for a European tour later that year. Their alterations, enhancing dynamic clarity, resulted in the last edition “sanctioned by Grieg himself”, as Grieg died a few months later.

Edvard Grieg had plans for a second piano concerto and wrote several piano sketches for a concerto in B-minor in 1883. He never completed it, but Norwegian composer Helge Evju has taken up the challenge to compose a work based on the incomplete concerto fragments, creating a romantic and beautiful companion concerto, faithful to Grieg’s musical style and flair.

Born in 1981 in Lund, Sweden, Carl Petersson started to play the piano at the age of fifteen. Ten years later he graduated from the Royal Danish Academy of Music in Copenhagen, where he completed both his studies in piano and pedagogy with José Ribera. During his studies he took part in numerous international master-classes in Denmark, Sweden and Israel. Four times in succession he won a scholarship to the Tel-Hai International Piano Master-Classes, where he studied with Pnina Salzman, Victor Derevianco, Emanuel Krasovsky, Staffan Scheja and Nicolai Petrov.

In the course of his international career Kerry Stratton has conducted orchestras around the world, including the Czech Philharmonic, the Jerusalem Symphony, the Slovak Radio Orchestra, the Moscow symphony, the Prague Radio Orchestra, and many others. With a particular fondness for Czech music, Stratton won the 2000 Masaryk Award for his services to Czech and Slovak culture and was decorated by the Czech government in 2007 at the Cernin Palace, Prague, with the Gratias Agit Award. Stratton’s career has been committed in part to expanding the orchestral repertoire with new as well as undiscovered scores. Currently he is conductor and music director of the Toronto Concert Orchestra.