Beethoven 200: Gala Evening - Leonskaja / Keller

The second weekend of February will be marked by Beethoven concerts boasting rich programmes and outstanding artists that will combine to lift the Concerto Budapest audience out of any late winter blues.

The first of these two concerts offering this guarantee will be dominated by compositions that evoke the images and atmosphere of a struggle with fate against odds so unequal that they only serve to make the fight all the more heroic. Whether it concerns the struggles of Coriolanus — the outstanding patrician general of early Roman history who was nevertheless expelled from his civic community precisely because of his excellence — or the eternal human struggle audible in the most popular of Beethoven’s symphonies, the Fifth, regardless of the moniker attached to it.

In contrast to these two works, the Piano Concerto No. 2 in B-flat major – here featuring the playing of Elisabeth Leonskaja, a celebrated Russian artist honoured as one of the grandes dames of the piano and a frequent visitor to Budapest – can only provide a taste of this extremely heightened drama, while making the remarkable sensitivity of the young Beethoven, who was eager to establish himself in Vienna, to Mozart’s style and influence more tangible in an immediate fashion.