Yulianna Avdeeva

If only we had some orchestral music by her too! Fanny Hensel left behind an overture, a few cantatas, wonderful chamber music and a large number of songs and piano pieces. But when, at the age of forty, supported by her husband Wilhelm Hensel (and against the reservations of her brother Felix Mendelssohn), she finally began to emerge as a ‘public’ composer with printed works, she had only a little over a year left to live. There will therefore never be a symphony by Fanny Hensel. Instead, the composer Detlev Glanert has now orchestrated her great piano cycle ‘Das Jahr’. This is no easy task, as the pianist – much celebrated in her day – wrote a delicate, transparent and virtuosic piano part. The twelve monthly pieces and the contemplative postlude combine moods, impressions of the landscape and chorales into a great poetic whole. It has often been suggested that the trip to Italy, which Hensel had undertaken two years earlier with her husband and nine-year-old son, provided the decisive inspiration here.

If Béla Bartók, too, drew inspiration from a landscape in his First Piano Concerto, it must have been a rather fantastical night-time landscape: Rugged and pulsating, with a piano that would have been better suited to the percussion section, yet at other times beguilingly sensual and mysteriously luminous. An inventive, astonishing piece that has lost none of its power in the hundred years since its creation. Yes, unlike Fanny Hensel, Béla Bartók was able to revel in his role as an ‘enfant terrible’. Pianist Yulianna Avdeeva, who has established herself internationally in the very top echelons of the piano world since winning the 2010 Chopin Competition, will bring out all the facets of Bartók’s music.
 

Individual tickets for subscription concerts can be booked from 20 August 2026. Until then, please send us an email specifying the desired category and number of tickets.  Red Sofa following the concert at the Park Hotel (Comensoli Hall). Roberto González-Monjas in conversation with Yulianna Avdeeva.