Programme:
Sergei Rachmaninoff: Piano Concerto No. 3 in D minor, Op. 30
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Béla Bartók: Hungarian Pictures, Sz. 97
Sergei Rachmaninoff: Piano Concerto No. 4 in G minor, Op. 40

Over the course of his long career, the pianist and conductor Mikhail Pletnev, won numerous awards for his recordings, including, in 2005, the Grammy for Best Chamber Music Performance for his own arrangement of Prokofiev’s Cinderella  as a suite for two pianos. He appears at the Ljubljana Festival with one of Hungary’s leading ensembles, the Concerto Budapest Symphony Orchestra, whose repertoire extends from large-scale classical orchestral works to contemporary Hungarian music. The second of two concerts by the orchestra and Pletnev as piano soloist will consist of the other two piano concertos by Sergei Rachmaninoff and another work by Bartók. Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 3  is one of the most demanding and the concert repertoire, while his Piano Concerto No. 4  is the least known and least accessible of the four, although at the same time the influences of jazz and the music of Alexander Scriabin make it one of the more complex and musically interesting of Rachmaninoff’s works. The two concertos will bracket Bartók’s Hungarian Pictures,  inspired by traditional Hungarian music. The orchestra will be conducted by Alexei Kornienko, an Austrian conductor of Russian descent, whose performances are characterised by an unconditional and joyful attention to text and also a boldness in interpretation.