Surprise Concert – Austria - Hungary

Today we’d like to tell you about our next concert, on 18 March 2019, in the Philharmonie. It’s meanwhile become a tradition with us to organize a concert once a year, for which we don’t announce the second half of the programme. This has often in the past led to surprising results. I’ve noticed that we generally approach music with a much more open mind if we don’t know what we’re listening to. So this time too we’d like to present a programme in which you only learn what we’ll be playing before the interval. Once again the piano has an important role and we’re very happy to have been able to persuade Martin Stadtfeld to take part. He’ll be playing a concerto by Beethoven that you probably don’t know in this form. The publishing-house Henle writes on this subject: “It is known only to few musicians that Beethoven reworked his Violin Concerto as a Piano Concerto. It is only fairly recently that a certain number of pianists have discovered this truly rewarding challenge. The London-based composer and editor Clementi heard about the first performance of the Violin Concerto and must have scented a business proposition. For he asked Beethoven for a version for piano, which did indeed appear in print, together with the original, in the year 1808.”

As for the second part, I can at least disclose that you’ll be hearing two works: A fairly short and rarely played symphony by a very well-known composer, and after that, almost as an “encore”, a short piece by a Hungarian composer which very seldom turns up in concert programmes but which is unusually beautiful and refreshing.

Look forward with us to a further concert full of surprises and unpredictable turns.