Brahms, Beethoven, Chopin: Benjamin Grosvenor’s Blockbuster Double Bill

Description

In a coup for the city, superstar soloist Benjamin Grosvenor is swinging back into Hong Kong to present a double bill which promises equal parts of bluster, emotion and virtuosity.  On 9 September, the British pianist’s midweek solo recital takes no prisoners — a quartet of contrasting sonatas, anchored around a pair of show-stopping blockbusters. Only the most special pieces of music can be performed ad infinitum and still tug at the heartstrings: in this category we can safely file Beethoven’s immortal “Moonlight” sonata, AKA Piano Sonata No 14, surely one of the most universally beloved compositions in the history of mankind. Grosvenor follows this tearjerker with the physical workout that is Chopin’s second sonata, a virtuosic masterpiece that he is on the closest of terms with, after recording it for his most recent album — famous for its third movement, the funeral march instantly familiar to all.

Between these two genre-defining hits sits the knottier, nastier and altogether more untameable notes of Scriabin’s unsettled, sea-inspired second sonata, while this shamelessly showboating programme commences with the stately trilling of Mozart’s Piano Sonata No 13.

This intimate occasion however is just the appetiser for the main event: Grosvenor’s performance alongside the Hong Kong Sinfonietta on 12 September, performing Brahms’ monumental, majestic and maximalist Piano Concerto No 1. Here the orchestra must be commended for rounding out the programme with two lesser-known works that challenge the typical concert hall hegemony. Written in the final decade of the 20th century, among the final wave of symphonic innovations before the form became obsolete, Nielsen’s electrifying Symphony No 1 revealed the composer’s radical concept of “progressive tonality” — and is possibly the first symphony to end in a different key to which it started.

The evening opens with the Asian premiere of contemporary composer Albert Schnelzer’s 2019 composition Burn My Letters – Remembering Clara, a frenetic, galloping composition inspired by the letters between Brahms and Clara Schumann, the piano virtuoso who performed premieres of many of his works. Both concerts commence at 20:00 on the dates stated.