“He is the true successor to the great Russian pianists of the past.” This is how a few years ago the highly respected Gramophone magazine characterized Boris Berezovsky, who has been a regular guest artist at concerts by Concerto Budapest. The Moscow-born, world-famous pianist further intensifies his collaboration with Concerto Budapest, because this time he also undertakes conducting duties at this daringly enterprising concert in which there are no fewer than three piano concertos with Berezovsky solos. The programme spans almost exactly a century, since the first piano concerto of Brahms dates from 1858, and the Shostakovich work was written in 1957. Brahms originally planned his D minor composition as a sonata for two pianos, then he began thinking in terms of a symphony, but finally it ended up as a piano concerto. At barely 20 in the early 1910s, Prokofiev didn’t exhibit as much indecision: “The First Concerto was perhaps my first more or less mature composition as regards both conception and fulfilment,” he wrote in his memoirs. Shostakovich penned the F major concerto to celebrate the 19th birthday of his son Maxim. It is cheerfully light music yet it demands considerable virtuosity.