STOCKHOLM, Sweden — Classical music is making a comeback in this
year's Nobel Prize festivities with a special performance at
Stockholm's Concert Hall featuring renowned cellist Yo-Yo Ma,
organizers said Monday [December 5].
Finnish conductor Sakari Oramo will lead the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra in the Nobel Prize concert on Thursday [December 8], two days before the award ceremony in the same building.
It is the first time since 2001 that the concert is on the program for the Nobel week, which also includes lectures by the laureates, science seminars and a white-tie banquet dinner at Stockholm's City Hall.
Literature prize winner Harold Pinter will not attend the Nobel festivities because of poor health. There were no details on his current condition, but the English writer has been treated for throat cancer in recent years.
Laureates often bring their families along as they bask in Nobel glory, but few have entourages as large as that of economics prize winner Robert Aumann. The Israeli-American is bringing his wife, five children and 21 grand children to Stockholm, Nobel Foundation spokeswoman Annika Ekdahl said. Aumann shared this year's economics prize with American Thomas C. Schelling.
Australians Barry J. Marshall and Robin Warren won the Nobel Prize in medicine, while the physics prize went to Americans Roy J. Glauber and John L. Hall and German Theodor W. Hänsch. Americans Robert H. Grubbs and Richard R. Schrock and Yves Chauvin of France won the chemistry award.
The Nobel Peace Prize, which is handed out in Oslo, Norway, went to Mohamed ElBaradei and the International Atomic Energy Agency he leads.
The prizes were established in the will of
Swedish industrialist Alfred Nobel. They are always presented on
December 10, the anniversary of Nobel's death in 1896.