Paul Lewis and Royal Liverpool Philharmonic

The concert of the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic led by its principal conductor Vasily Petrenko with the pianist Paul Lewis will bring this year’s jubilee 70th-annual Prague Spring festival to a close. Together, they will be performing Brahms’s Piano Concerto in D Minor Op. 15. The composing of the concerto was surrounded by highly emotional circumstances, as was similarly the case with Brahms’s First Symphony. During its composing, for example, Brahms altered the basic conception of the work more than once. The result was three strikingly contrasting movements, the music of which was described by Arnold Schönberg as basically a combination of a symphony and a concerto, in which the piano and orchestral parts are on an absolutely equal footing. 

Dvořák’s Symphony No. 7 in D Minor Op. 70, will be heard on the second half of the programme. The symphony’s premiere took place in London in 1885. Its somber mood is often attributed to a crisis that Dvořák underwent during the mid-1880s in connection with his constantly growing international popularity and the fears of failure he experienced in connection with that success.