This Nordic-oriented concert features Lang Lang in Edvard Grieg’s Piano Concerto, composed during a summer holiday in Denmark when Grieg (himself a virtuoso performer) was just 24. The young Norwegian composer was still under the spell of Robert Schumann’s Piano Concerto, which he had heard for the first time while he was a teenager studying at the Leipzig Conservatory. So it is no coincidence that Grieg cast his concerto in the same key as Schumann’s and sought to capture qualities similar to Schumann’s in his own—including what he called “its noble disdaining of an extrovert, virtuoso style.” Though Grieg’s concerto does include a rip-roaring first-movement cadenza—which prompted an ovation at the premiere that brought proceedings to a temporary halt—most of the music, like Schumann’s, requires sensitivity, variety of touch, poetry, finesse, lilt, and imagination as additional elements of virtuoso display. And to all of this Grieg added a crucial personal element, following upon his wish to create a specifically and distinctively Norwegian music.

Finnish composer Outi Tarkiainen is deeply influenced by the culture of the Sámi people native to the Arctic Circle region in northern Finland and adjacent countries. Her seven-minute, richly atmospheric Day Night Day, she writes, is about “the northern light and ice that every winter invade the land but that reflect the early spring light in brilliant spectra.” The piece is related to her opera project Day of Night, based on a novel by the Sámi writer Niillas Holmberg.

Jean Sibelius had made a name for himself in the early 1890s with ambitious orchestral and vocal scores based on Finnish folklore and the compendium epic the Kalevala. Later in the decade, he turned to the ostensibly more abstract genre of symphony, composing the first of his seven in 1899, evidently partly in response to having heard Tchaikovsky’s final symphony, the “Pathétique.”