Münchner Philharmoniker / Alexandre Kantorow / Thomas Hengelbrock

Hengelbrock and the Munich Philharmonic have been collaborating for many years. And as the former head of the NDR Elbphilharmonie Orchestra, the conductor is also a familiar face in the Hanseatic city. His extremely successful recordings of Johannes Brahms’s four symphonies also stem from this period. The composer, who was born in Hamburg in 1833, worked on his anthemic first symphony for an incredible 14 years as he strove to live up to his great idol Beethoven.

Sergei Rachmaninov worked much faster: he was only 17 when he composed his first piano concerto as a student at the Moscow Conservatory. Kantorow, the young French pianist, is the ideal artist to interpret this virtuosic work. The »poet of the piano«, as The Telegraph called him, has been conquering the hearts of the international classical music world ever since he won the prestigious International Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow in 2019.