This afternoon concert conducted by András Keller and starring one of Concerto Budapest’s favourite Hungarian artistic partners, Mihály Berecz, offers a representative work from each of two phases of Ludwig van Beethoven’s titanic career: one from his early, still foundational, years coloured by the young composer’s hunger for success, and the second from his mature, albeit still loaded with extraordinary human dramas, period.

On this occasion, the extraordinarily talented young musician will play Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 1 in C major, whose final movement – as legend has it – was only completed at the last minute before the premiere, where the composer himself played the solo part, although a semitone higher, in D-flat major, a daring trick employed in order to compensate for the detuned and depressed sound of the piano provided, as well as the tuning problem he noticed between the instrument and the orchestra as a whole.

The Symphony No. 2, which expanded the boundaries of the genre and boldly changed the previously established minuet in the third movement to a Scherzo, was composed in the shadow of what was already increasingly severe, even incurable, hearing loss and in poignant chronological proximity to the so-called Heiligenstadt Testament, which contended with a seemingly hopeless situation.