Concerto Budapest Presented by Liszt Academy

“He is the true successor to the great Russian pianists of the past.” This is how a few years ago the highly respected Gramophone magazine characterized Boris Berezovsky, who has been a regular guest artist at concerts by Concerto Budapest. The Moscow-born, world-famous pianist deepens his collaboration with the orchestra by this time also undertaking conducting duties at this daringly enterprising concert, the programme of which contains no fewer than three piano concertos featuring Berezovsky solos. The programme spans almost exactly a century, with first piano concerto of Brahms written in 1858, and the Shostakovich work dating from 1957. Brahms originally planned his D minor composition as a sonata for two pianos, then he began thinking in terms of a symphony, but finally it ended up as a piano concerto. In the early 1910s, at barely 20 years of age, Prokofiev didn’t exhibit as much indecision: “The First Concerto was perhaps my first more or less mature composition as regards both conception and fulfilment,” he wrote in his memoirs. Shostakovich penned the F major concerto to celebrate the 19th birthday of his son Maxim. It is cheerfully light music, yet it demands considerable virtuosity.