Trevino, Kozhukhin / Liszt, Mahler by Mahler, Liszt, De (2019/2019), Director musical Robert Treviño, Wiener Konzerthaus, Vienna, Austria

Franz Liszt wrote seven works for piano and orchestra, but called only two of them “concertos”. The origins of his Piano Concerto No. 1, which will be interpreted by the award-winning pianist Denis Kozhukhin, go back to his youth: He started to work on it in 1830, at the age of 19, and it was only in 1853 that the work received its final form. It was then premiered two years later in Weimar, with Berlioz conducting and the composer at the piano. With its four movements, which are played without interruption, this piano concerto is one of the best examples of Liszt’s mastery of the cyclic form: the first theme is subjected to a succession of radical transformations in order to highlight the sharply contrasting ideas on which the entire structure is based. Of course, the concerto owes its popularity less to these thematic and structural subtleties but primarily to the stunning pure physicality of the virtuoso piano part and the opposing colourful orchestral parts. It will be combined with Mahler’s Symphony No. 5, one of the composer’s most popular and most frequently performed works. The fourth movement, Adagietto, became known far beyond the world of classical music, namely as film music in Luchino Visconti’s Death in Venice, which can be heard in the “Im Klang [Within the Sound]” concert at the Wiener Konzerthaus concert hall, instead of the entire work