Markus Poschner & Bruckner Orchester Linz

Program booklet for the event

The Piano Concerto No. 2 in B flat major by Johannes Brahms resembles a "symphony with obbligato piano", as the critic Eduard Hanslick noted, with a playing time of around 50 minutes and its four instead of the usual three movements, whereby the innovative fusion of symphonic and concerto form does not stand in the way of a highly virtuoso solo part. When the work, with the composer as soloist, received its acclaimed premiere on 9 November 1881, Hans Rott, who Brahms had been mocking, was already nearing his end, as Joseph Seemüller, who visited him in the psychiatric ward on the same day, reported to a mutual friend: "Hans [...] is still preoccupied with thoughts and plans that are all based on an erroneous connection between his circumstances and his fate. His physical appearance is poor."

His ingenious Symphony (No. 1) in E major conveys an indelible impression of what might have been if Rott's exceptional talent had been fully developed, and makes it possible to understand why Gustav Mahler recognised in his fellow student the "founder of the new symphony" and thus his direct role model. Like Brahms' Second Piano Concerto, begun in May 1878, the symphony is an astonishing masterpiece in which melodic and harmonic inventiveness, brilliant yet nuanced instrumentation, an individual tonal language and a complex network of motivic and thematic references create an astonishingly cohesive musical unity.

The star pianist Marc-André Hamelin and the Bruckner Orchestra Linz under the direction of its principal conductor Markus Poschner create a sonorous panorama of a conflict-ridden period full of compositional and aesthetic trench warfare, in the course of which Bruckner found himself exposed to fierce hostility and proclaimed the antipode of Brahms, while his favourite pupil Rott found himself caught between the fronts of musical conflict and ultimately in the mills of the so-called music controversy