To Berlin this week for a concert by the Berlin Radio Symphony, conducted by Rafael Frühbeck de Burgos and featuring the legendary Rudolf Buchbinder in a performance of the Beethoven “Emperor” concerto. The concert was broadcast on April 2010 by RBB, Berlin.
The concert begins with Beethoven’s Egmont overture, followed by the Piano Concerto number 5 “Emperor” with Buchbinder joining the orchestra. The concert concludes with Stravinsky’s Rite Of Spring.
A word or two from Rudolf Buchbinder’s webpage:
Rudolf Buchbinder is one of the legendary artists of our time. His piano playing is an unparalleled fusion of the authority of a career spanning more than 60 years with spirit and spontaneity. His renditions are celebrated worldwide for their intellectual depth and musical freedom.
Particularly his renditions of Ludwig van Beethoven’s works are considered to be exemplary. He has performed the 32 piano sonatas cyclically all over the world more than 50 times and developed the rendition history of these works over decades. He was the first pianist to play all Beethoven sonatas at the Salzburg Festival over a festival summer. A live recording is available on DVD.
On the occasion of Ludwig van Beethoven’s 250th birthday, in the 2019/20 season the Wiener Musikverein is dedicating its own cycle of the five Beethoven piano concertos to Rudolf Buchbinder. He plays these as a soloist with the Gewandhaus Orchestra Leipzig under Gewandhaus music director Andris Nelsons, the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra under Riccardo Muti and with the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, the Munich Philharmonic Orchestra and the Sächsische Staatskapelle Dresden under their chief conductors Mariss Jansons, Valery Gergiev and Christian Thielemann.
Another première will also be the focus of the Beethoven Year 2020. Based on Beethoven’s famous Diabelli Variations Op. 120, a series of new Diabelli Variations is being created on the initiative of Rudolf Buchbinder. As a co-production of various international organisers, the commission was awarded to eleven leading contemporary composers.
In 2019, Rudolf Buchbinder became an exclusive artist of Deutsche Grammophon. Numerous award-winning recordings document his career.
Rudolf Buchbinder is an honorary member of the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra and the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra. He is the first soloist to be awarded the Goldene Ehrennadel by the Staatskapelle Dresden.
About Rafael Frühbeck de Burgos via his obituary in the June 12, 2014 edition of The Telegraph:
Rafael Frühbeck de Burgos, who has died aged 80, was a conductor who delivered memorable interpretations of the works of his Spanish compatriots while championing the Germanic canon on the Iberian P eninsula.
His work took him to orchestras around the world, but he was best known for his associations with the Philharmonia in London and the Philadelphia Orchestra in the United States.
De Burgos collaborated extensively with the pianist Alicia de Larrocha, particularly in Manuel de Falla’s Nights in the Garden of Spain, which is exquisitely captured in their 1993 recording for Decca, and Victoria de los Angeles, with whom he made an early recording of the same composer’s The Three Cornered Hat for HMV (1963).
As well as proselytising for the better known Spanish composers — such as de Falla, Albéniz and Granados — de Burgos championed the music of lesser-known compatriots, including the serialist Luis de Pablo. In addition, his magisterial accounts of the great choral classics such as Orff’s Carmina Burana (which he recorded with Lucia Popp), Mendelssohn’s Elijah and Mozart’s Requiem drew widespread acclaim, and he claimed to have conducted the first performance of Bach’s St Matthew Passion in Spain. Indeed, as the critic Richard Morrison once wrote, de Burgos blended “Teutonic precision with Iberian sensuality, just as his name suggests”.
Relax and enjoy.
