Bernard Haitink and Leif Ove Andsnes perform Brahms’s Second Piano Concerto

In the 2010/11 season, the Philharmoniker family grew to include a regular visitor: Leif Ove Andsnes who, as Pianist in Residence, worked together with members of the Berliner Philharmoniker in chamber music concerts and also appeared as a soloist. The highlight of the evening was his performance of Johannes Brahms’s Second Piano Concerto with conductor Bernard Haitink, which many consider to be the epitome of the mamoth, late Romantic warhorse. A commentary by American National Public Radio shows just how well Andsnes uncovered the deeper layers in his performance, according to which, the soloist played the work “with a combination of authority and humility,” which “allowed the music’s architecture to build”.

At the beginning of the concert, the orchestra and the audience remembered the victims of the earthquake and the nuclear disaster in Fukushima in Japan a few days previously. To that end, in a change of programme, they played Witold Lutosławski’s Funeral Music for string orchestra, originally composed in memory of Béla Bartók. Lutosławski’s Fourth Symphony from 1992 which followed, is a work of retrospection, in which Lutosławski – two years before his death – reviews once more all the techniques of his long, productive life as a composer. This multiform symphony was performed by the Berliner Philharmoniker in this concert for the first time.

Berliner Philharmoniker

Bernard Haitink

Leif Ove Andsnes