Rarely-performed piano concerti

That evening at the festival there will be performances of three works for piano and orchestra that are rarely included in the repertoires of concert pianists. The names of two composers – Anton Rubinstein and Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov – are closely linked with St Petersburg and the Mariinsky Theatre, where the premieres of almost all of both their operas took place. Their piano concerti, however, remained in the shadow of opuses by Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninoff. Nevertheless, they are interesting examples of the genre in Russian music.
In the late 1890s, the Czech composer Leoš Janáček also became closer to Russia and St Petersburg's music culture; today his legacy in the Mariinsky Theatre's repertoire is represented by the opera Jenůfa. Like Rubinstein and Rimsky-Korsakov's concerti, Janáček's Capriccio for Piano and Wind Instruments is being performed for the first time at the Concert Hall.