Live, Video: Find classical music concert, opera, ballet and dance reviews | 33 Variations for piano in C major "Diabelli Variations", Op.120

In a wonderful piano recital, Mitsuko Uchida presented Schubert’s Four Impromptus and Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations.

In her annual appearance at Carnegie Hall, Mitsuko Uchida plays Schubert's G Major sonata and Beethoven's Diabelli Variations.

This concert was prefaced by a short film of Michael Houstoun speaking about Beethoven and his experiences with the composer’s music. He movingly recounted his first encounter with Beethoven, the Appassionata Sonata recorded by Arthur Rubinstein, and how it first inspired a lifelong love and affinity.

The story of Beethoven's Diabelli Variations is well known. The composer and publisher Anton Diabelli wanted to promote his new firm, and chose to do so by inviting fifty composers of varying fame to write a variation on his own waltz theme. Beethoven was, of course, the dominant figure in Vienna at the end of the 1810s, and his variation was to be the highlight.

Peter Serkin is a pianist of Brendelian demeanour whose interpretations of the classics are full of striking rhetorical contrasts: controlled but unpredictable dynamic extremes, always urgent and occasionally strident rhythmic expression, and a keyboard manner which is aloof one minute, playful the next.

“You will never, ever hear greater piano playing,” said Dame Fanny Waterman, DBE, as she stood on the stage of the resplendently-refurbished Royal Hall in Harrogate.

Le jeune pianiste réalise un tour de force dans ces trente-trois variations interprétées sans monumentalisme, avec un geste instrumental marqué par l'étonnement, l'improvisation, tout en respectant scrupuleusement le texte.

Mitsuko Uchida hielt im Pierre Boulez Saal die Zeit an.

Igor Levit livre un récital Beethoven travaillé et déroutant. Somptueuses, les Sonates opus 109 et opus 110 paraissent néanmoins factices, privilégiant l'instant à la grande trajectoire... que l'on trouve heureusement dans les Diabelli.

À l’occasion de l’exposition « La collection Courtauld », la Fondation Vuitton invite le jeune pianiste Filippo Gorini pour un récital entièrement consacré aux Variations Diabelli de Beethoven.

Artiste à part, Piotr Anderszewski donnait au Théâtre des Champs-Élysées un récital consacré à Bach et Beethoven. Un voyage décousu qui n'a pas pleinement convaincu.