Bahnbrechend

It is a response to traumatic experiences, a confrontation with loss and mortality – and yet, despite long passages of melancholy, it is so gentle, conciliatory, at times almost bathed in heavenly light: Anton Bruckner’s Seventh Symphony was not only the first resounding success of the hitherto often ill-fated, now 57-year-old composer; it remains, even today, the most frequently performed of his nine symphonies. Yet the work does not merely process the horrors of the 1881 fire at Vienna’s Ringtheater, which claimed the lives of 386 people and which the composer himself had escaped only by chance. It is also a declaration of love to Richard Wagner, whom Bruckner idolised and whose death in 1883 shook him to the core. The Seventh – a work full of mysterious ciphers, theological symbols, profound confessions of the soul, and, in its musical language, nothing short of groundbreakingly modern. Michael Sanderling sets out in search of clues and delves into a cosmos of mysteries.

»I am working on a few ‘concertos that make one break a sweat’«, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart wrote to his father in Salzburg from Vienna in 1784. Among these masterpieces of keyboard art is the Piano Concerto K. 450, whose highly virtuosic solo part the composer wrote specifically for his own hands. What is more: with this stroke of genius, he created a truly groundbreaking work that breaks with the form of the classical solo concerto, develops it imaginatively, introduces something completely new (such as the solo treatment of the woodwinds in the orchestra) and, in so doing, paves the way for the further development of the piano concerto in the 18th and 19th centuries. Pierre-Laurent Aimard is the ideal interpreter for one of Mozart’s most beautiful piano concertos: he has performed it time and again across the globe, shines in the first movement, leaves all earthly heaviness behind in the middle movement, and effortlessly conjures up the glittering finale. Mozart himself would surely have had to admit that here sits someone at the piano whom nothing can faze.