Programme:
Sergei Rachmaninoff: Concerto for Piano and Orchestra No.3 in D Minor, Op.30
Johannes Brahms: Symphony No. 2 in D Major, Op. 73

Cast:
Lukáš Vondráček – piano
Janáček Philharmonic Ostrava
Eiji Oue – Conductor

The 31-year-old Opava native Lukáš Vondráček won a famous victory in the extremely challenging Queen Elisabeth Piano Competition in Brussels in 2016. Thanks to that, he is extremely busy, and he chooses very carefully which offers of concerts to accept. This time he is coming to Ostrava with the third piano concerto of the greatest musical melancholic Sergei Vasilievich Rachmaninoff. The composer considered this work to be more comfortable to play, and therefore he preferred it to his more famous Second Concerto. This piece is one of his most difficult compositions written for piano. In the hands of Haydn, Mozart and especially Beethoven, the genre of the symphony experienced its first golden age. But then it went out of fashion and was worked with mostly by second-rate composers. The symphonic poem, on the other hand, became very popular. This situation lasted until the mid-1870s, when Brahms and Dvorak “bowed down” to Beethoven’s message and made the symphony a corner-stone of a number of later composers’ works.
While Dvořák composed his compositions with considerable ease, and at the time he had completed five symphonies, Brahms had been working on the improvement of his first attempt of a follow-up on Beethoven for more than twenty years. However, he wrote his second symphony within one summer in 1877, during a holiday in the countryside, and filled it with a special mixture of melancholy and a pastoral mood.