Daniel Barenboim - Piano Concertos - DVD

What if chamber music returned to it's traditional venue within well-loved artists' homes? Initially, chamber music was composed for the private sphere, but ended up losing part of it's essence as this form started performing within venues that gradually expanded. This double program rekindles the origins of the genre by showing itself inside the living rooms of grand artists for original concerts, played in an intimate and privileged setting at Daniel Barenboim's in Berlin, where he plays with Michael Barenboim and Kian Soltani; and at Martha Argerich's in Geneva, with Mischa Maisky. They invite us to hear masterpieces of the chamber repertoire in a new light Beethoven, Schumann, Chopin, Brahms... and between each movement, the artists confide about their lives and their art to presenter, Annie Dutoit, who has known them all since childhood. A tender musical lesson.

Ludwig van Beethoven's piano works occupy a special place in Margarita Höhenrieder's artistic work. In a certain sense, this is almost InchlogicalInch, since she herself is part of a very special Beethoven lineage her teacher Leon Fleisher was a student of Arthur Schnabel, who in turn studied with Theodor Leschetizky, who had learned his piano playing from Carl Czerny. And Czerny was a student of Beethoven!For the recordings of all five of Beethoven's piano concertos, Margarita Höhenrieder has top-class orchestras and conductors at her side, including the Staatskapelle Dresden under Fabio Luisi and the Bamberg Symphony under Martin Haselböck. The recordings are complemented by extensive bonus material a portrait of the pianist and conversations between Höhenrieder and the conductors provide an insight into the life and work of an artist for whom her own concert activities are just as important as the education of the next generation.

Antoni Wit conducts the Warsaw Philharmonic Orchestra with soloists Nikolai Demidenko and Evgeny Kissin, live at the National Philharmonic Hall, Warsaw, February 27, 2010.