Berliner Symphoniker, Gudni Emilsson and Khatia Buniatishvili

One of the most prominent pianists of her generation, Khatia Buniatishvili gave her first concert with an orchestra when she was six and was an established international performer by the age of ten. After studying at the Vienna University of Music and Performing Arts she signed with Sony Classical as an exclusive artist in 2010. Since then she has released a series of acclaimed recordings of romantic classical music. In 2024 she performed at the reopening of Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris. The Berliner Symphoniker occupies an important place in the musical life of the German capital, with a strong emphasis on music education, through which it has, for decades, nurtured its youngest audiences. The orchestra is led by the Icelandic conductor Gudni A. Emilsson, a former prizewinner of the Herbert von Karajan Foundation, who has been the artistic director of the Tübingen Chamber Orchestra since 1999 and is also the artistic director of the Prague-based Camerata Bohemica.

The evening begins with the Piano Concerto No. 1  by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, the first Russian composer to achieve lasting international renown. The work is famous for its expansive, highly lyrical introduction, which may seem self-contained but actually contains the key musical material of the entire concerto, in which folk melodies are woven into a symphonic framework. This is followed after the interval by Ludwig van Beethoven’s Symphony No. 7, one of his rhythmically most vital works. Composed at a time when Beethoven’s hearing loss was growing markedly more severe, the music nonetheless radiates driving energy, shaped by insistent rhythmic figures and dance-like impulses.