Riccardo Minasi leads the Concertgebouw Orchestra in Beethoven’s timeless Symphony No. 5, preceded by Emilie Mayer’s Faust Overture. Mao Fujita shines in Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 25.
About this concert
They are perhaps the most famous four notes in the history of music: Beethoven’s ‘da-da-da-daaaa’ motif like a knock at the door in the Fifth Symphony. This motif is the germ from which unfolds an extraordinarily ingenious structure that sounds as urgent today as it did over 200 years ago. We are performing this exhilarating early nineteenth-century masterpiece under the direction of Riccardo Minasi.
The concert begins with music by Emilie Mayer, a successful nineteenth-century composer who later faded into oblivion. Her Faust Overture was critically acclaimed in the early 1880s. Come and hear why for yourself. The overture is immediately followed by the return of Mao Fujita! Following his memorable 2023 Concertgebouw Orchestra debut in Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 1, the Dutch daily NRC praised the ‘clarity, richness of colour and the finesse with which he seamlessly assembled passages’. The young pianist then blew the audience away with Mozart’s ‘Sonata facile’ as his encore. His performance of Mozart’s sublime Piano Concerto No. 25 should be very special indeed. Either side of the meditative slow movement, Mozart pulls out all the stops both in the piano and in the orchestra.
This motif is the germ from which unfolds an extraordinarily ingenious structure that sounds as urgent today as it did over 200 years ago.
