CANCELLED: London Philharmonic Orchestra / Cho / Gardner

The most important thing about competitions is not winning, but giving up the title again in the years to come. No-one wants to remain the winner of the Chopin Competition in year X – then people will only want to hear the pianist play Chopin. And any development of the musician’s personality as an artist is more or less ruled out. So we are not going to mention here that Seong-Jin Cho won a certain contest in 2015… In the meantime, the Korean pianist has definitely become one of the big stars of the classical music scene. Tonight he plays Franz Liszt’s Second Piano Concerto, on which the composer worked for more than 30 years, accompanied by the London Philharmonic Orchestra under its new principal conductor Edward Gardner. In contrast to the time Liszt spent on his piano concerto, it only took Edward Elgar a few months in the winter of 1898 to write his »Enigma Variations«, a collection of pieces each of which is dedicated to a friend of his.