Acclaimed Austrian pianist Rudolf Buchbinder has performed the first concert of a Mozart miniseries at the Concert Hall of the Mariinsky Theatre.
Renowned for his dedicated approach to studying the Viennese classics, at the Stars of the White Nights festival Buchbinder has already presented large-scale monograph programmes. In 2011 the pianist performed all of Beethoven’s sonatas and in 2013 there came the complete concerto series. This time there will be performances of the most famous and best-loved piano concerti by Mozart.
There is a widely-known phrase of the composer himself, defining in a letter to his father the genre of the piano concerto as “a mid-course between being too hard and too easy, very brilliant, pleasing to the ear, naturally without lapsing into emptiness, here and there only connoisseurs will find satisfaction but in such a way that even non-connoisseurs must feel content without knowing why...”
25 June will see three concerti being performed: the Ninth, composed by Mozart at the age of twenty-one for Victoire Jenamy, the daughter of the famous dancer and choreographer Jean-Georges Noverre, the final concerto (No 27), performed by the composer at his last public concert on 4 March 1791, and Concerto No 25, completed the same year as the opera Le nozze di Figaro and probably first performed by the composer himself in Prague.
On 26 June Buchbinder will present a further three concerti – the Twenty-Third, famous for its lento movement to which Angelin Preljocaj staged the striking duet with the kiss in the ballet Le Parc, and Concerto No 24, which drew the admiration of Beethoven and formed the model of his Third Piano Concerto; the programme concludes with Piano Concerto No 22, with its serious variations in minor key in the centre, which at the premiere – to the composer’s surprise – the Viennese audience asked for an encore.
In addition to performing the solos, on all three evenings Rudolf Buchbinder, following the spirit of late 18th century music, will also be appearing as a conductor, directing the Mariinsky Orchestra.
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