Kazuki Yamada / Alexandre Kantorow

The Orchestra of the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia conducted by Kazuki Yamada, accompanied by the piano soloist Alexandre Kantorow, presents the Symphonic Metamorphoses on themes by C.M. von Weber by Paul Hindemith, the Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini by Sergej Rachmaninov and the score of the ballet Petruška by Igor Stravinsky at the Auditorium Parco della Musica; three masterpieces of which the first two arise from the encounter between classical and contemporary composers.

In the Symphonic Metamorphoses on themes by C.M. von Weber of 1943, the German composer who expatriated to the United States, offers the public, through Weber's themes, covered in brilliant and kaleidoscopic orchestration, an expressive immediacy that makes them one of the most loved pieces by the public to this day. The Rhapsody on a theme by Paganini, op. 43 for piano and orchestra, composed by Rachmaninov in 1934, is one of the last compositions of the great Russian musician and is structured in 24 variations that follow one another without interruption; the work is unanimously considered one of Rachmaninov's most successful works, in which the composer masterfully combined virtuosic flair with the rigor of formal construction.

Finally, in the piano score of Pétrouchka, derived by Stravinsky in 1947 from the orchestral one, which narrates the sad story of the puppet in love, the composer explores new expressive possibilities of the piano, from which arises a virtuosity determined by a disjointed and jagged rhythm to which popular elements are not unrelated; all this produces an incredible vitality to which is added a color palette that finds few comparisons.

Kazuki Yamada is music director of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra; Yamada is also artistic and musical director of the Orchester Philharmonique de Monte-Carlo. Born in 1979 in Kanagawa, Japan, he continues to work and perform in Japan every year with the NHK Symphony Orchestra and the Yomiuri Nippon Symphony Orchestra. Shortly after taking up the post in Birmingham, Yamada toured Japan with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra in the summer of 2023.

In 2019, at the age of 22, Alexandre Kantorow became the first French pianist to win the gold medal at the Tchaikovsky Competition, along with the Grand Prix, awarded only three times in the history of the competition. Critically acclaimed as the “young piano tsar” (Classical) and “Liszt reincarnated” (Fanfare), he has received numerous other awards and has been invited to give concerts around the world at the highest levels. In 2020 he was winner of the Victoires de la Musique Classique in two categories: recording of the year and instrumental soloist of the year.

Photo credits: courtesy of the Auditorium Parco della Musica official site