Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra / Kantorow / Honeck

Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra
Alexandre Kantorow – Piano
Manfred Honeck - Conductor

Award-Winning

Alexandre Kantorow, who in 2019, at the age of 22, became the first Frenchman to win the Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow, opens his portrait series at the Vienna Konzerthaus with Brahms’ Piano Concerto No. 1. His rise to fame has been phenomenal. Shortly afterward, *Der Standard* hailed him as the “best pianist in the world”; he was even dubbed “the reborn Liszt.” In 2024, an audience of millions watched him open the Olympic Games in Paris, where he played Ravel’s “Jeux d’eau” on a bridge over the Seine in the pouring rain. Johannes Brahms, however, is among his favorite composers. He perceives Brahms’s works as sensual and organic, “…like the roots of a tree, from which the mighty network of branches and leaves unfolds quite naturally.”

Heavy and Grand​

The path to his Piano Concerto No. 1 was a rocky one for Brahms. At first, he wanted to rework his Sonata for Two Pianos into a symphony, but he was unable to do so—until the idea struck him to develop it into a piano concerto. “The first movement, a scherzo, and a finale—terribly difficult and grand. I was absolutely thrilled,” Brahms wrote to Clara Schumann in 1855. “I’m also working on a gentle portrait of you, which is to become the Adagio.” The audience was equally impressed at the premiere in Hanover in 1859.

Powerful and Grotesque

The Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra performs the orchestral part in this concert and, in the second half, performs Dmitri Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 5. With a recording of this powerful work conducted by Manfred Honeck, the orchestra won two Grammys in 2018, one of them for Best Orchestral Recording. Shostakovich composed the symphony in 1937, shortly after falling out of favor with Stalin due to his opera *Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk*. With his outwardly conformist, triumphant Fifth, Shostakovich was met with great acclaim. Today, however, one hears in it an exaggeration that turns the powerful, relentless marches into something grotesque.

Program:

Johannes Brahms – Concerto for Piano and Orchestra No. 1 in D minor, Op. 15 (1854–1859/1875)

Dmitri Shostakovich – Symphony No. 5 in D minor, Op. 47 (1937)