No way, Norway!
I have had the privilege to see the Oslo Philhamonic live once in Helsinki on a tour program with their current music director, Jukka-Pekka Saraste. I was quite impressed with their performance, and based on that concert I would say that they are certainly on a world-class level, despite their relatively low visibility on the international orchestral scene.
Having lived in Helsinki for several years now I have regularly checked the Oslo Phil's season schedules to see if there is any rare, must-not-miss repertoire that would be worth the short flight to see. For the most part, I would not consider their repertoire of recent seasons to be anything particularly earth-shattering, so you could imagine my surprise when I saw that...
The Oslo Philharmonic is playing Pettersson this coming season!
So, place your bets! The Barefoot Songs or the Symphony No. 7? If you guessed the symphony, you win! Oslo, 22 September 2011, pretty close to Pettersson's birthday. Check it out here (pdf, page 10)
Although it is easy for me to gripe about yet another performance of the Symphony No. 7 (I can feel the pain of Gustav Holst fans), I am hoping that this is a sign of bigger things to come. In addition to Christian Lindberg, several other conductors have recently added Pettersson to their repertoires, and perhaps they will now take up his cause and did deeper into his oeuvre and program the less frequently performed works. Jan Michael Horstmann, Jan Söderblom, Roman Kofman, Eivind Aadland (the conductor of the Oslo performance), Johannes Gustavsson, Stefan Solyom...perhaps they will become champions for the cause???
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