Camerata Salzburg: Mozart / BrahmsHélène Grimaud (piano)
When Hélène Grimaud heard Johannes Brahms’ Piano Concerto in D minor for the first time as a 13-year-old, she instantly fell in love with it. It was, as she recently explained in an interview, an experience that precipitated deep-rooted changes in her. She now performs the work together with Camerata Salzburg at the Isarphilharmonie.
When Hélène Grimaud heard Johannes Brahms’ Piano Concerto in D minor for the first time as a 13-year-old, she instantly fell in love with it. It was, as she recently explained in an interview, an experience that precipitated deep-rooted changes in her. She now performs the work together with Camerata Salzburg at the Isarphilharmonie.
Hélène Grimaud has an intimate relationship with Johannes Brahms’ Piano Concerto in D minor, which she has already recorded twice. Brahms originally wrote the work as a sonata at the age of 21, later transforming it into a large-scale piano concerto that challenged the conventions of its genre. Grimaud is fascinated by the work’s deeply personal character: “It seems to me as if he wrote it ‘in the first person’; it’s as if he was laying out detailed memoirs before us.”
The French pianist, whose global career spans 30 years and counting, is equally active in other fields: having made a name for herself as a human rights activist and author of several novels, she is also committed to saving wolves threatened with extinction. But music remains her primary medium of all-encompassing self-expression.
Programme
- Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart: Symphony No 40 in G minor, K 550
- Johannes Brahms: Piano Concerto No 1 in D minor, Op 15
With
- Camerata Salzburg
- Hélène Grimaud, piano
- Giovanni Guzzo, violin & conductor
