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 despite the reservations of her brother Felix Mendelssohn), she finally began to make a name for herself as a ‘public’ composer with published 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 – who was much acclaimed in her day – wrote a delicate, transparent and virtuosic piano part. The twelve pieces, one for each month, 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 their 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 nocturnal landscape: Rugged and pulsating, with a piano that seemed almost to belong to the percussion section, yet at other times beguilingly sensual and mysteriously luminous. An imaginative, astonishing piece that has lost none of its power in the hundred years since its creation. Indeed, unlike Fanny Hensel, Béla Bartók was able to revel in his role as an ‘enfant terrible’. The pianist Yulianna Avdeeva, who has been firmly established in the very top echelons of the international piano world since winning the 2010 Chopin Competition, will bring out all the facets of Bartók’s music.