Curtis Institute, and with Rudolf Firkusny,
Leon Fleisher and Rudolf Serkin.
100 North Charles Street, 16th Floor, Baltimore, MD 21201
Yefim Bronfman last performed with
the BSO in June 2009, playing Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto No. 2 with
Maestra Alsop conducting.
Let us serve you.
About the concert:
Piano Concerto No. 5 in E-flat
Major, “Emperor”
Ludwig van Beethoven
Born in Bonn, Germany, December 16, 1770;
died in Vienna, Austria, March 26, 1827
There is a certain irony in the subtitle
of “Emperor” that was later given to
Beethoven’s Fifth and final Piano Concerto, but never used by the composer
himself. By the spring of 1809 when
Beethoven was creating his “Emperor”
Concerto, the last person he would have
wanted to honor was the emperor of the
day, Napoleon Bonaparte. Years earlier,
he had angrily obliterated a dedication to
the French leader he’d once admired from
the title page of his Third Symphony, the
“Eroica,” after he learned that Napoleon
had just crowned himself Emperor. “Now
he will become a tyrant like all the others,”
the composer raged.
Now in May 1809, Napoleon’s armies
were actually besieging the city of Vienna.
Beethoven’s home was in the line of fire of
the French cannons, and he was forced to
flee to his brother’s house, where he holed
up in the cellar with a pillow pressed to
his still sensitive ears. But his work on his
new Concerto did not cease.
And yet in many ways “Emperor,”
taken in a more generic sense, is an appropriate title for this concerto. It is a work of
imperial size and scope — particularly in
its huge first movement — and it reflects
its war-riven era in its virile, martial tone.
Its key — E-flat major — was one of
Beethoven’s favorites and one he associated
with heroic thoughts; ]\