One of Europe's finest orchestras teams up with a legendary conductor and one of the most ingenious solo artists of our day in this exceptional concert from the Leipzig Gewandhaus! Riccardo Chailly leads the storied Gewandhaus Orchestra, joined by piano virtuoso Hélène Grimaud, in a delightfully varied program of Ravel and Gluck that sees the French pianist bring her trademark lightness to works of formidable difficulty…
The concert begins with the sublime Piano Concerto in G by Ravel, composed the same year as his Concerto for the Left Hand. The first differs from the second in that the soloist, rather than compete with the orchestra, becomes a part of it. The composer acknowledged the influence of Mozart and Saint-Saëns on this concerto, which takes up rhythms of blues and jazz in its first and third movements and boasts one of the most ethereally beautiful, transporting second movements of any piano concerto in the repertoire. Few pianists navigate this terrain more capably than Grimaud, who finishes the evening with Giovanni Sgambati's arrangement of melodies from Gluck's Orfeo ed Euridice and receives a well-deserved, thunderous acclaim from the audience!
