Czech Philharmonic • Alan Gilbert

Piano Concerto No.20 in D minor, K 466 (32')

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart

The popularity of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s works that we see these days was far from a matter of course in the century following his death. It is usual for a new artistic style to reject everything that had been popular before in order to promote its own views on creativity and beauty. The story of Mozart’s life appealed to the musicians of the Romantic period: his overly adult childhood, his financial troubles, and his premature death. But those same musicians viewed his compositions as too affected, even naïve, failing to reflect the real world, let alone a person’s inner life. However, if there was any work by Mozart that performers and audiences of the first half of the 19th century idolised, it was the Piano Concerto in D minor, K 466.

A large share of responsibility for this concerto’s popularity in those days lies with Ludwig van Beethoven, who often performed the work in public and wrote several cadenzas for it. There are also other cadenzas, such as those by Johannes Brahms and Clara Schumann. The tempestuous beginning, the minor key (as one of only two of Mozart’s 27 piano concertos), and the contrasts between the themes are “Beethovenian” attributes that are already present from the first movement, and that is what so enchanted Beethoven.

With his Piano Concerto No. 20, Mozart began a series of six exceptionally fine works for piano and orchestra written in quick succession in 1785–1786, at the same time as The Marriage of Figaro, the Prague Symphony, and a series of important chamber compositions. Prague’s residents may have had a greater understanding of Mozart’s operas, but in those days the Viennese had a great appreciation for Mozart’s “academies”, i.e. concerts that he presented, performing his own new works. He played the piano part of his Piano Concerto in D minor at a concert held in Vienna at the casino “Zur Mehlgrube” on 11 February 1785. The ink had not yet dried on some of the orchestral parts that had been copied out at the last moment. The work was enormously successful, and not only thanks to the acclaimed performance of the soloist, conductor, and composer in one person. Mozart’s father Leopold was in attendance at the premiere, and he referred to it afterwards in a letter to his daughter Nannerl: “I heard Wolfgang’s excellent new piano concerto, for which the copyist was still writing out the parts at the moment when we arrived, and because your brother had to supervise the copying, he did not have time to play through the Rondo.”

Mozart wrote a concerto that makes great demands on both the orchestra and the soloist. Despite the first movement’s tempestuous orchestral introduction, the piano creeps in with a calm, lyrical theme that alternates with a fast passages played together with the orchestra—acting as protagonists, the soloist and the accompaniment maintain their intense dialogue the until the end of the first movement. The slow Romanze again begins with a lyrical theme played by the piano and repeated immediately by the orchestra, which then maintains the established calmness of tempo (but not calmness of emotions), while the piano part gradually fills in virtuosic passages. Even in the Romanze, Mozart, being a master of drama, is able to conjure up tension, only to return immediately to the opening lyricism. The real drama erupts with the third movement, formally a rondo. The main theme takes turns with highly contrasting passages, whether featuring pairs of woodwinds or alternation between the minor and major mode. Even the very end of the movement after a brief solo cadenza heads off for D major. It seems as if despite the unusual choice for the main key, Mozart wanted to reassure everyone that he had not lost his detachment or his amiability.

Kirill Gerstein

piano

Born in the territory of the former Soviet Union, the pianist Kirill Gerstein studied in the USA, Spain, and Hungary, and at present he lives in Berlin. Today an American citizen, he represents something like an intersection of the interpretive traditions that he absorbed while maturing as a pianist, taking inspiration from them to create a musical language of his own. Besides his geographical mobility, he also moves freely between historical periods: his repertoire includes works of the traditional canon and contemporary music. He also grew up with jazz. 

It was jazz that took him to the Berklee College of Music as the youngest student in the school’s history at 14 years of age. Acting as an intermediary was the jazz legend Gary Burton, whom Gerstein had met in Saint Petersburg. In Boston, he studied jazz and classical piano for several years before deciding ultimately for the career of a classical pianist and heading for New York’s Manhattan School of Music. After graduating, he further broadened his interpretive horizons under Dmitri Bashkirov at the Escuela Superior de Musica Reina Sofia in Madrid and under Ferenc Rados in Budapest. At that time, he began appearing on concert stages, helped by winning the famed Arthur Rubinstein International Piano Competition in Tel Aviv.

He built up the reputation of a world-class pianist known for advanced technique, intelligent interpretation, and careful reading of scores. As a soloist, he performs with the world’s most renowned orchestras, including the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra and the Zurich Tonhalle Orchestra, the Danish and Estonian National Symphony Orchestras, the Orchestre de Paris, and the Vienna Symphony Orchestra in the 2025/2026 season. He has also given recitals in Japan and Ireland, among other places.

He is known for interpreting contemporary music, having even used the money from the Gilmore Artist Award to commission new works. He is associated in particular with the composer Thomas Adès, who composed his Piano Concerto for Gerstein, whose recording of the work with the Boston Symphony Orchestra received a 2020 Grammy nomination and won a Gramophone Award. In 2021 they together received the International Classical Music Award for Gerstein’s recording of Adès’s solo piano compositions and his music for two pianos, which they recorded together.

In 2025, he premiered Spanish composer Francisco Coll’s Two Waltzes Toward Civilization at Carnegie Hall, and in the spring of 2026, he performed his piano concerto there together with Sir Simon Rattle, accompanied by the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra.

Gerstein is tied to the Czech Philharmonic by years of collaboration dating back to 2012 when the orchestra was still led by Jiří Bělohlávek, and continuing with many more visits to Prague, performances on tour in Europe and America, and a recording of Tchaikovsky’s piano concertos. He last performed at the Rudolfinum in 2024 with Mozart’s Piano Concerto in D minor.

Gerstein is passing on his experience to piano students at the Hanns Eisler Academy of Music in Berlin and at the Kronberg Academy. Under the auspices of the latter institution, he has made a series of online seminars with the title “Kirill Gerstein invites…”, debating with such important figures from the world of music as Thomas Adès, Kaija Saariaho, and Sir Antonio Pappano.

Alan Gilbert

conductor

“Today it’s our job—musicians and the public alike—to write the next chapter in music history together: to play and listen to the music of our time, always in search of works that will last”, says the conductor Alan Gilbert, who has been devoting himself systematically for years to performing the works of contemporary composers. He is active in Europe and the USA, and we find him in concert halls as, among other things, the chief conductor of Hamburg’s NDR Elbphilharmonie Orchestra or (until 2017) the music director of the New York Philharmonic, and in famed opera houses. He won a Grammy for the recording of his debut at New York’s Metropolitan Opera (with opera Doctor Atomic by John Adams in 2008).

A native of New York, he received the best musical education, studying first at Harvard University while adding variety to his studies with violin lessons at the New England Conservatory of Music. Later, he studied conducting at the Curtis Institute, which even conferred an honorary doctorate on him in 2010, and at the Juilliard School under the guidance of Otto-Werner Mueller. Professional engagements took him from the Cleveland Orchestra and the Santa Fe Opera to the New York Philharmonic, becoming that orchestra’s music director in 2009. He was responsible for a major transformation of that already prestigious orchestra, especially in the direction of performing contemporary music, to which he devoted two whole concert series. Later, he pushed through a similar concept with Hamburg’s NDR Elbphilharmonie Orchestra, of which he became the chief conductor in 2019: a biennale titled “Elbphilharmonie Visions”, with performances of music by composers of the 21st century in the course of ten days in February 2023. Last season, Gilbert led the orchestra in the world premiere of the violin concerto The Elements written by five composers brought together by one soloist, Joshua Bell, the orchestra’s artist-in-residence at the time.

Besides truly contemporary music, for the promotion of which he received the Ditson Conductor’s Award from Columbia University in 2011, Alan Gilbert also enjoys devoting himself to music of the 20th century. He is an advocate of the works of Carl Nielsen, whose symphonies he has also recorded with the New York Philharmonic. “Nielsen’s music follows the tradition of Beethoven, Brahms, and Tchaikovsky, but with peculiar Danish fingerprints. It is entirely accessible, fresh, compelling, and it simply speaks to people”, says Gilbert, who is convinced that the works of that Danish composer should appear more often on the programmes of the world’s orchestras. Although in 2014 the New York Classical Review declared that “No one plays Nielsen better than Gilbert and the New York Philharmonic”, Gilbert has also enjoyed success with the composer’s works elsewhere, such as with the Tokyo Metropolitan Orchestra and the Czech Philharmonic. 

Besides holding permanent engagements, Alan Gilbert also collaborates with other important orchestras such as the Berlin Philharmonic, the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, the London Symphony Orchestra, and the Boston Symphony Orchestra. As an opera conductor, besides appearing at the Metropolitan Opera, he has also introduced himself, for example, at Dresden’s Semperoper and at Milan’s La Scala. Since the spring of 2021, he has been the music director of the Royal Swedish Opera, where he performed Strauss’s Elektra and Wagner’s Parsifal last season. Recently, the King of Sweden appointed him as the Royal Court Kapellmeister.