Season Finale: Jukka-Pekka Saraste & Igor Levit

A sparkling ray of sunshine lights up the HK Phil’s season finale, opening with Finnish composer Outi Tarkiainen’s Midnight (Sun) Variations, inspired by the Arctic summer night and the birth of her first child. Igor Levit, hailed by The New Yorker as “a pianist like no other”, brings fearless intensity and intellectual clarity to Prokofiev’s progressive Second Piano Concerto – a work that once bewildered audiences, yet was recognised as a work of genius for its originality, written in memory of a friend of the composer at the St Petersburg Conservatory who died by suicide.