Yuja Wang / Gustavo Gimeno / OPL

02.06.2019 19:00,

Grand Auditorium

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Orchestre Philharmonique du Luxembourg
Gustavo Gimeno direction
Yuja Wang piano

Piotr Ilitch Tchaïkovski: La Tempête (Der Sturm)
Maurice Ravel: Concerto pour la main gauche (Konzert für die linke Hand)
Dmitri Chostakovitch: Concerto pour piano et orchestre N° 2
Maurice Ravel: Daphnis et Chloé. 2e suite

It is a sporting challenge the Chinese pianist Yuja Wang rises to in this concert: two Piano Concerti in one evening, both chock-full of technical difficulties. Ravel’s Concerto from the early 1930s was written for the virtuoso Paul Wittgenstein, who had been injured in World War I. Shostakovich wrote his Piano Concerto N° 2 in 1957 as a birthday present for his son Maxim. This Franco-Russian double is also reflected in the works bookending the piano concerti: these works by Tchaikovsky and Ravel seek out landscapes described by the writers Shakespeare and Longus: a tossed magical island and an idyllic Greece peopled by shepherds and shepherdesses.