Emanuel Ax & the Concertgebouw Orchestra play John Williams

Emanuel Ax

The master pianist Emanuel Ax has made frequent guest appearances with the Concertgebouw Orchestra, demonstrating his amazing versatility time and again. Another living legend, the film music composer John Williams (of Star Wars, Jaws, Jurassic Park, E.T. and Harry Potter fame), has written a piano concerto especially for him. Instead of Williams’s familiar ‘Spielberg sound’, the concerto mainly showcases his love of jazz in a surprisingly modern guise. No film music from Williams here, but very nearly from Tchaikovsky, whose Francesca da Rimini is a true mini-drama about an adulterous couple punished by a hellish windstorm.

Thomas Søndergård conducts the Concertgebouw Orchestra

The Danish conductor Thomas Søndergård also conducts Dvořák’s Sixth Symphony, a hidden gem last performed by the Concertgebouw Orchestra over twenty years ago. The Sixth proved to be Dvořák’s international breakthrough work as a symphonist. This music is like a friendly landscape in the spring sunshine, full of the melodic miracles that made his colleague Brahms so envious.