Klassische Philharmonie Bonn / Caleb Borick / Alexander Hülshoff

The season of the Klassische Philharmonie Bonn ends as it began – with Beethoven! This time, however, Beethoven’s most famous symphony, Symphony No. 5, which has become known as the Fate Symphony, is juxtaposed with a piano concerto by Johannes Brahms. Brahms’s second piano concerto was composed 22 years after the first work in this genre and is partly symphonic in scale. And yet Brahms himself wrote about the work to Elisabeth von Herzogenberg that he had written »a very small piano concerto with a very small, delicate scherzo«. The soloist in this concert is the 21-year-old American Caleb Borick, who won the International Telekom Beethoven Competition in 2023. But the beginning of the concert starts up north to the Scottish Hebrides: Felix Mendelssohn was privileged by his wealthy family, enabling him to undertake numerous journeys – including to Scotland, to the Hebrides, whose rugged beauty he translated into nature.