Tour: Prokofiev, Mozart, Schumann

A true legend will take the stage with the Budapest Festival Orchestra. The grande dame of the piano, the “priestess of art,” Elisabeth Leonskaja, who won the Lifetime Achievement Award of the International Classical Music Awards (ICMA) in 2020, has received the highest distinctions in both Austria and Georgia, and was the winner of a competition at the age of 19 before a jury led by Arthur Rubinstein. She later performed in duo with Sviatoslav Richter while conquering the world’s most prestigious concert halls. This time, she will perform one of Mozart’s most popular and grandiose piano concertos, and the only one concluding in a minor key. This piece will be framed in a special manner. The concert will open with the orchestral version of Prokofiev’s chamber overture written for original Hebrew themes and conclude with a Schumann symphony inspired by pleasant experiences and calling to mind a peaceful riverside excursion.

For his own works, Prokofiev almost never used folk music melodies or those borrowed from other composers. This is why this overture, written for Hebrew themes, occupies such a special place in his oeuvre; it is more than a simple exercise in style. It is a rethinking of genuine Hebrew melodies. The composer was commissioned to write the piece in 1919 in the United States by clarinetist Simeon Bellison, who presented Prokofiev with a book of songs to serve as inspiration. Prokofiev rejected the request, but then fell in love with the world of the melodies after all. He sketched out the piece – originally conceived for the clarinet, a string quartet and the piano – in just one day, and then finalized it in less than two weeks. It presents and explores two themes in detail, evoking the world of the klezmer.

Performing a Mozart piano concerto requires a pianist at least as skilled as Mozart himself, as the composer wrote these works for himself. He composed a dozen concertos for piano for his Vienna concerts between 1784 and 1786, and premiered the one in C minor at the final appearance. Of his 27 piano concertos, only two are in a minor key, and, while the C minor concerto also ends in minor, it is less dramatic than the D minor, which brightens into a radiant major. The stormy opening movement is reminiscent of Beethoven’s style, and the chromaticism appearing throughout the piece is also quite unexpected in Mozart. Despite all this, the music has an almost chamber-like quality, just like the gentler and more serene slow movement. The concerto concludes with a variation movement assigning the winds a prominent role, shifting back and forth between minor and major keys, and rounding off the work with a rhythmic ending.

Schumann’s appointment as Düsseldorf’s musical director helped him recover from a difficult period in his life. After a pleasant trip with his wife around his new home in the Rhineland, his experiences inspired him to write a symphony entitled “A Piece of Life in Rhineland”. Though he later retracted the program, the moniker “Rhenish” quickly stuck to the piece. The nature music of the first movement opening with a heroic theme is followed by a moderately paced movement with a ländler and a drinking song, which is a mixture of a Scherzo and the variation form. This is followed by a slow movement exuding calm with static harmony and understated orchestration. Before the finale, the solemn, archaistic music inspired by the Cologne Cathedral and called the “Cathedral” movement comes alive with trombones. The piece concludes with a light dance-like finale, bringing back the cheerful atmosphere of the opening movement.