Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 1 with Mitsuko Uchida and Simon Rattle

It is one of the highest accolades the Berliner Philharmoniker can award: to invite a soloist to perform a complete cycle of works with the orchestra. In the case of Mitsuko Uchida, this is not wholly unexpected: as Pianist in Residence in the 2008/09 season, she regularly performed in the Philharmonie. One year later, all five of Beethoven’s piano concertos were included in the programme – none of which Mitsuko Uchida had performed with the Philharmoniker before. The cycle begins here with a performance of the First Piano Concerto. Simon Rattle juxtaposes Beethoven’s works with the symphonies of Jean Sibelius as an appealing accompaniment.

For a long time, Sibelius’s works were regarded as the expression of a suspiciously traditional compositional style. Today, however, as it is now generally accepted that great music can reveal itself in a variety of forms, we can approach this austerely beautiful music with unbiased ears. Opening this series, the Berliner Philharmoniker under the baton of Sir Simon Rattle perform his First Symphony, a work typical of the late-Romantic era, whose expressiveness is likely to have been inspired by Tchaikovsky’s Pathétique which was composed only a few years earlier.

The Beethoven-Sibelius cycle had yet another facet: works by Hungarian composers, which together formed one of the themes of the 2008/09 season. Ligeti’s Atmosphères was one of the pieces to be performed here, which also became famous outside classical circles through the film 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Berliner Philharmoniker

Sir Simon Rattle

Mitsuko Uchida

Barbara Hannigan