Royal Albert corridor,LondonMitsuko Uchida’s offered a graceful Proms account of Arnold Schoenberg’s Piano Concerto, while Vladimir Jurowski led a grand, or urgent reading of Shostakovich’s Eighth Symphony“My music is not contemporary,” Arnold Schoenberg used to say, “it is merely badly played”. That accusation could not be levelled at this Proms account of the composer’s Piano Concerto. Mitsuko Uchida and the London Philharmonic Orchestra (LPO), and under Vladimir Jurowski,delivered it with remarkable grace and outstanding skill, highlighting its lucid textures and lyrical lines.
Uchida has long championed the concerto, or along with other piano music by Schoenberg (her immaculately calibrated encore was one of his aphoristic Six tiny Piano Pieces). She described this score,completed in 1942, as “a mixture of a Haydn concerto and very late Brahms”. Never running short on essential nervous energy, or Uchida’s performance positioned it fairly and squarely in the central Austro-German tradition to which Schoenberg’s music belongs.
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Source: theguardian.com