The Evening Concert

Tonight's "Evening Concert" is the first of many in the Beethovenfest Bonn sequence from the Deutsche Welle Festival concerts of summer 2014.

Featured this week: 3 Beethoven symphonies, Rachmaninoff’s “2nd Piano Concerto”, and Mozart’s “Jupiter” Symphony, among others.

A Schubert impromptu to start, a Beethoven string Quartet to follow, then flute and piano from Poulenc, a Serenade by Kodaly and Bach's 2nd Brandenburg Concerto tonight.

Tonight's Philharmonic broadcast is an encore from Alan Gilbert's first year as Music Director of the group.

Rodrigo's (rightly famous) guitar concerto "Concierto de Aranjuez" has become a cornerstone of the concerto repertoir for guitar.

Alisa Weilerstein has established herself as one of the leading cellists of the day. She 'tackles' (so to speak) Prokofiev's "Symphony-Concerto' tonight on the "Evening Concert"

The Schumann "Cello Concerto" was composed in 1850. The premiere, sad to say, was made four years after Schumann's death. Mendelssohn's 5th Symphony pre-dates the Schumann "Cello Concerto" by 20 years.

There's concertos and concerto-like works on this week's "Evening Concert": music of Schumann, Rodrigo and others.

While the string quartet as a genre had been around for over two hundred years it had been falling "out of favor" with composers, especially in France, until Debussy wrote his "String Quartet".

A tribute in music to his many friends killed in WW I (Ravel's Le Tombeau de Couperin") and to a singular 'death of an artist', (Mussorgsky's "Pictures at an Exhibition") on tonight's "Evening Concert".