Hélène Grimaud spielt Ravel by Various, Sat 18 Jan 2020, From (2020/2020), Conductor Jakub Hrůša, Konzerthalle, Bamberg, Germany

For the world-renowned pianist Hélène Grimaud, one thing is certain: »Music can serve as a reminder that alongside the trivialities of everyday life there is a place that preserves meaning and that we do not suffer from the burden of forgetting: the miracle of life is ability , to reflect and to remember.« One of her favorite repertoire focuses is Ravel's Piano Concerto in G major – with this work »written in the spirit of the concertos by Mozart and Saint-Saëns« he achieved a brilliant success after the First World War. Despite the almost classical concentration, the concerto also shows a lot of wit, jazz elements and colorful virtuosity - and contains moving passages, especially in the slow movement, which the premiere pianist Marguerite Long found "so indescribably beautiful" that she confessed: »The tears ran down my eyes!« Our chief conductor then holds the musical threads together for Gustav Mahler’s vision of a heavenly land of milk and honey: the fourth symphony, premiered in 1901, is one of the »Wunderhorn symphonies« because it contains the song in the final movement »The Heavenly Life« from the folk song collection by Achim von Arnim and Clemens Brentano, which was extremely popular in the Romantic era. In the masterful confessional work, all movements form a whole linked by thematic and motivic relationships - and roughly trace the attempt of a child's mind to regain lost innocence in a place of longing on the way through experiences in the "worldly turmoil".