Programme Guide

András Schiff is a pianist with a clearly circumscribed repertoire. Liszt, Rachmaninov, Ravel – he never plays a single note by any of them. By his own admission, he is only interested in composers whom he recognises as having a connection to music by Bach – such as Mozart and Haydn, both of whom feature in this programme for his guest appearance in this concert with the Berliner Philharmoniker. And for this concert, Bach himself, of course, could not be omitted.

In this recording, Schiff appears on the platform as both pianist and conductor – just as Baroque and Classical composers of the day once directed their concertos from the keyboard. The evening opens with Bach’s Piano Concerto No. 1 in D minor, a work which the Berliner Philharmoniker had not performed for over half a century – or, to be more precise, not since the legendary performance with Glenn Gould and Herbert von Karajan in 1958. 

Schiff meaningfully couples this work of Bach’s with Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 20, which is also in D minor and already foreshadows with its sombre emotion the Romantic piano concertos of the 19th century. A not dissimilar world of expression is evoked in the demonic Don Giovanni overture as well as in Haydn’s Military Symphony, in which latter work the composer succeeds in making tangible the depths and horrors of war – powerful evidence to refute Haydn’s widely assumed blandness.