Khatia Buniatishvili & Concerto Budapest

The gifted, 32-year-old Georgian pianist phenomenon Khatia Buniatishvili has been a regular guest of Concerto Budapest for nearly a decade and at the same time a huge favourite with the domestic concert-going public. This time she arrives to take the solo part in Rachmaninov’s Piano Concerto No. 2: on of the most famous works of music history, that was written between 1900-01 precisely for performers with the sort of explosive energy and unparalleled technique that she demonstrates. A little nothing... nobody would dare say this about Buniatishvili’s undertaking, but could about the opening number, because this is the title of the ornithological composition (1964) by Bernd Alois Zimmermann. The chamber orchestra work in which a prominent role is given to moonlight comprises seven short movements and closes with a boogie-woogie. Richard Strauss’s Divertimento similarly requires a chamber orchestra apparatus, but this time it is made up not of seven but eight movements, each one of which utilizes motifs from François Couperin’s works for harpsichord, thus paying tribute to the French Baroque master who was born almost 200 years before Strauss.