© Moritz Wizany
About this Concert
CAMERATA and its audience transition from the Mozarteum to the Großes Festspielhaus for a grand symphonic program. Although no symphony is nominally scheduled for this concert, both works are symphonic in nature—secret symphonies, due to their compositional style.
Even as a very young composer, Johannes Brahms "tried his hand at a symphony, even orchestrating the first movement," as he wrote to his mentor Robert Schumann in 1855. However, Brahms ultimately felt that his creation was not yet suitable for the symphonic format, which he only fully embraced two decades later. This early draft was eventually incorporated into his First Piano Concerto in D minor. Hélène Grimaud, closely associated with CAMERATA as an artistic partner, will perform this piece. For her, the work is "profound, fiery, romantic, a self-contained world of its own. It seems to me as if he wrote it 'in the first person'." In other words, it is a piece of subjective artistic expression, created in Brahms' youthful Sturm und Drang period. The concerto demands immense technical skill from the soloist and harmonizes with the orchestra on the scale of a Beethoven symphony, with a performance time of three-quarters of an hour. Despite its grand scale, CAMERATA dares to perform the concerto without a conductor: Soloist Hélène Grimaud and concertmaster Giovanni Guzzo will jointly assume the role of conductor, marking another major step on CAMERATA's self-determined path.
CAMERATA contrasts the d minor concerto with another Brahms work in D major, written around the same time: the Serenade No. 1. Originally intended as a nonet, Brahms later orchestrated it for the same instrumentation as the piano concerto, with the aim of "transforming it into a symphony." However, Brahms ultimately retained the title "Serenade" due to the work's six-movement, serenade-like structure.
