For the season’s closing concert, the Mahler Chamber Orchestra returns to the LAC alongside Yuja Wang in a program entirely dedicated to Brahms’s two concertos for piano and orchestra. This monumental diptych, performed by one of the most charismatic artists on the international scene and a world-class ensemble, highlights two pivotal moments in the composer’s career.
Mahler Chamber Orchestra
Yuja Wang
© Rolex Christopher Anderson
© Deniz Saylan
1/2
Mahler Chamber Orchestra
Yuja Wang
© Rolex Christopher Anderson
© Deniz Saylan
1/2
Founded in 1997 on the initiative of Claudio Abbado, the Mahler Chamber Orchestra is one of the most influential international ensembles on today’s music scene, composed of musicians from over twenty countries and recognized for its artistic identity and chamber-music approach to ensemble performance. In the demanding role of soloist and conductor, Yuja Wang joins the MCO: one of the most celebrated pianists of her generation, admired for the virtuosity and communicative power of her performances.
Brought together in a single program, the two Brahms concertos clearly illustrate the evolution of the composer’s thinking; Brahms was also an exceptional pianist. Concerto No. 1, the result of a long and troubled gestation, bears the marks of dramatic tension and a strongly symphonic structure, in which the piano and orchestra engage on an entirely equal footing. Concerto No. 2, composed more than twenty years later, broadens the formal and poetic horizon with a monumental yet more expansive style, rich in contrasts and lyrical momentum.
The result is a grand two-part fresco that reveals Brahms’s conception of the concerto as a symphonic form that is as virtuosic as it is expressive.