Live, Video: Find classical music concert, opera, ballet and dance reviews | Piano Concerto, Op.42

François-Xavier Roth conducts the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra with pianist Kirill Gerstein in a thrillingly played trio of Debussy, Schoenberg and Stravinsky.

This unusual program had the unlikely pairing of Schoenberg's Piano Concerto and Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue, for which Kirill Gerstein was a brilliant soloist. 

An austere yet emphatic Fidelio, focussed and detailed Schoenberg, followed by an affecting, powerfullly bleak Shostakovich Eighth Symphony from Jusrowski & the LPO.

Hitchcock’s Norman Bates meets Bartók’s death defying Miraculous Mandarin, by way of Schoenberg angular 12-tone Piano Concerto - with the odd man out being Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue. 

How do you solve a problem like Schoenberg? Sweetening the musical pill is a good start, and whilst neither the billed Brahms nor Beethoven received saccharine readings, the contrast between the angularity of the programmed modernism and the sheer beauty of these canonical works was all the more acute through their juxtaposition.

Andris Nelsons' Bruckner-Interpretation wurde zu einem farbenreichen Höhepunkt.