BEETHOVEN / BRAHMS // Buniatishvili / Keller

Two heroic Beethoven works, both bearing the number three, and another festive collaboration between Budapest audience favourite Khatia Buniatishvili and András Keller and the Concerto Budapest ensemble, this time on a piece by Brahms.

This is what we have lined up in this programme, which, in keeping with the spirit of the bicentenary of Beethoven’s death, will be primarily devoted to large-scale works the composer wrote around the middle of the first decade of the 19th century.

The first composition of the evening will be the greatest result of the various transformations that emerged in tackling the chronic problem of creating an introduction for Fidelio, the Leonore Overture No. 3, which condenses the totality of Beethoven's only opera into a tight quarter of an hour.

The closing number of the concert, the Eroica symphony, well known for originally being intended as a tribute to Napoleon Bonaparte, promises a similarly intense and riveting experience, this one nearly an hour in length. Between the two, we will get to welcome to the stage the always astonishing Georgian-French musician Khatia Buniatishvili, who this time will serve as the worthy soloist in Brahms’s Piano Concerto No. 2 in B-flat major. The public premiere of the piece took place, to the eternal glory of Hungarian musical history, in Budapest in 1881 – with the composer himself at the piano.