Lecture Concert

About the event

On 28 March 1943 the great Russian pianist, composer and conductor Sergei Rachmaninoff died in Beverly Hills, USA, almost 100 years after the great Polish pianist and composer Fryderyk Chopin. Both exceptional musical personalities are regarded as the most prominent representatives of piano music of Slavic character, and both left a lasting mark on the history of piano music. While Chopin, in his mere 39 years, revolutionised the possibilities of piano technique and identified with the instrument like no other, entrusting to it his most intimate and poetic inspirations, the universal musician Rachmaninoff once again expanded the virtuoso possibilities of piano music after Liszt in undreamt-of ways and enriched the literature with a considerable œuvre. Because he remained faithful to his style far into the 20th century, at a time when entirely new aesthetic and modern currents were establishing themselves around him, he is still called the “last Romantic” today.

Wolfgang Manz, professor at the Nuremberg University of Music and president of the Rachmaninoff Society in the Federal Republic of Germany, offers a presented concert covering a cross-section of the most important genres of Rachmaninoff's piano works, exploring affinities of character and spirit as well as similarities and differences between two of the most significant composers of Romantic piano music.

Biographies