London Philharmonic Orchestra: Mitsuko Uchida plays Beethoven

This April at the Royal Festival Hall, an all German programme of Beethoven, Brahms, and Zimmermann sets the stage for a meeting between two Everests of today’s musical landscape. Ably supported by the London Philharmonic Orchestra, acclaimed conductor Vladimir Jurowski and legendary pianist Mitsuko Uchida take on the headline roles in a concert that promises to be one of the most sought-after tickets of 2014.
Mitsuko Uchida’s reputation precedes her, and her mantelpiece must be creaking like an elephant’s floorboards beneath the numerous awards that decorate it - The Royal Philharmonic Society Gold Medal, the Suntory Music Award, a Grammy and two Gramophone Awards to name but a few. Uchida’s performances of Beethoven are held in particularly high esteem, so we look forward to watching her getting stuck into Beethoven’s masterful Piano Concerto No. 3. That, and hearing her muscle her way through the driving Mozartian Rondo that concludes the piece.
Jurowski comes to the fore after the interval, leading the orchestra through Brahms’s Symphony No. 4. A Brahms symphony is always a bit of a tricky customer to conduct: the challenge is to foreground the structure while allowing the organicism of Brahms’s melodic development to shine through. Jurowski has always had a gift for the communication of form, so we put all of our trust in him to steer us safely through the symphony, all the way to the final movement’s thunderous passacaglia. 
These two German masterworks are preceded by Bernd Alois Zimmermann’s criminally underappreciated orchestral masterpiece Photoptosis. “Photoptosis” roughly translates from the Greek as “incidence of light”, and Zimmermann’s ingeniously scored orchestral prelude paints a journey from “dark” to “light” sonorities in remarkably vivid tonal colour. Listen out for a cheeky little quotation from the second movement of Beethoven’s ninth around the seven minute mark, which may well elicit a few chuckles from bat-eared audience members.