Balázs Fülei will be the soloist of two great and well-known piano concertos on April 24 at the House of Arts in Miskolc; the concert will be conducted by Mátyás Antal. In the first half of the evening, Beethoven’s last piano concerto, the one in E flat major written in 1809, also known for the audience as the “Emperor” concerto, will be performed. Alfred Brendel writes in his memoirs that Arthur Rubinstein, at the age of 87, played the piece heavenly at a concert in Zurich, followed by a Chopin encore, and then he was chatting with the then 47-year-old Brendel until 2 a.m. When the latter started to feel sleepy, Rubinstein noted: the problem with you, today’s youth, is that you can’t handle the load. 

The other piece of the evening will be Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto in B minor, which the composer intended for Nikolai Rubinstein. (The pianist mentioned above is only a namesake). Now it is strange to imagine that there was a performer who rejected a piece Tchaikovsky wrote for him, and yet: Rubinstein simply did not like the piece and did not want to deal with it. Hans von Bülow, however, one of Liszt’s favourite students, happily accepted the invitation, so he became the soloist of the 1875 premiere in Boston.

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