Elisabeth Leonskaja and the Concerto Budapest 1.

Photo: Marco Borggreve

It is always a fantastic and festive occasion when the audience is able to greet the grand dame of the piano, Elisabeth Leonskaja. This fact will be proven by this concert, where she will play Brahms’s Concerto for Piano in D minor, which demands complete physical and intellectual presence from the soloist. The world premiere of the Concerto in 1859 was received with complete confusion, but, only a few years later, it became one of the fundamental works of the concert repertoire. Almost a hundred years later, in December 1953, Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 10 was performed in Leningrad under entirely different circumstances. Excitement and positive expectations preceded the premiere, as it meant that, after eight years of silence, the witch hunt of Zhdanov’s cultural policy and, of course, Stalin’s death, the composer returned to the genre of the symphony. The Symphony, conducted this time by András Keller, is particularly remarkable with respect to its shortest second movement, as this famous and aggressive scherzo depicts a portrait of the Soviet tyrant through music.