Vikingur Ólafsson to Premiere John Adams’s New Piano Concerto 

The Icelandic pianist will give the world premiere of Adams’s new work with the San Francisco Symphony on January 16, 2025

Pianist Vikingur Ólafsson, who recently achieved one billion career streams worldwide, is set to give the world premiere of John Adams’s After the Fall piano concerto with the San Francisco Symphony (SFS). 

He will perform with conductor and longtime Adams collaborator David Robertson from January 16–19, 2025, before touring the new concerto across Europe in the spring.

The premiere is inspired in part by Ólafsson’s acclaimed Bach performances. This collaboration will mark the ninth work the SFS has commissioned from Adams, who has worked closely with them for more than 45 years.

“Vikingur has a special affinity for my music,” Adams said. “After the Fall was written with his extraordinary gifts in mind. He is one of the great Bach pianists of our time, so it’s no surprise that a ‘presence’ of Bach prevails in parts of this new concerto.” 

The concerto’s title, After the Fall, acknowledges another piano concerto, No Such Spring, written by Adams’ son Samuel Carl Adams, which was premiered by SFS and Esa-Pekka Salonen with pianist Conor Hanick in 2023. 

“I was so overwhelmed by it that I really didn’t think I could ever write another piano concerto,” Adams recalled. “So the title is partly a tip of the hat to Sam’s piece: there is no such spring after the fall.” 

“[Ólafsson] genuinely loves my music and knows nearly all of it — not just my concertos but the operas and orchestral works,” he added. “Vikingur possesses an enormously wide bandwidth of expressive possibility. His Rameau and Bach and Mozart have incredible delicacy, but when the music calls for it, he can make the piano sound huge without banging it. I tried to incorporate that awareness into After the Fall.”

The second half of the program will feature Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana featuring singers Susanna Phillips, Arnold Livingston Geis, and Will Liverman, alongside the San Francisco Girls Chorus, and the San Francisco Symphony Chorus. 

Following the world premiere, Ólafsson will tour After the Fall between January and May 2025 with the Tonhalle-Orchester Zürich and Paavo Järvi, and the Vienna Symphony with Lahav Shani across Zürich, Hamburg, Paris, and Vienna.

Ólafsson and Adams (Photo credit: Stefan Cohen)