Bach / Rachmaninoff / Brahms // Vinnitskaya / Keller

Opening Concerto Budapest’s final concert on the schedule will be some music by Johann Sebastian Bach, whose work accompanyies the ensemble throughout the entire 2025/26 season, here performed in modern arrangements for full orchestra credited to Arnold Schönberg. The guest artist at the concert conducted by Kossuth Prize-winner András Keller is the Russian pianist Anna Vinnitskaya. Celebrated worldwide and justifiably boasting a host of admirers in Budapest, tonight she will play the tremendously demanding solo part in Sergei Rachmaninoff’s First Piano Concerto, which he composed at the age of 18 and then radically revised more than a quarter of a century later. And to conclude, we will hear the fourth and last of the Brahms symphonies, which also share the spotlight throughout the season. In an unusually cheerful mood in the summer of 1885, shortly after completing the piece, the composer modestly described his work as “a few entr’actes which I happened to have lying about... which together are usually called a symphony.”