Rudolf Buchbinder & Yutaka Sado perform Gershwin & Schoenberg

For the opening concert of the 2024 Grafenegg Festival, festival director Rudolf Buchbinder joins the Tonkünstler-Orchester Niederösterreich and conductor Yutaka Sado on the open-air Wolkenturm stage for a programme featuring two giant – but deeply contrasting – figures of 20th-century music. To open, Buchbinder is the soloist in George Gershwin’s Piano Concerto in F – a remarkable fusion of the musical language of jazz with the form of western classical music – while the second half features a large-scale late-Romantic tone poem, Pelleas und Melisande, by Arnold Schoenberg, a composer who later became the figurehead of musical modernism as well as a huge admirer of Gershwin.