Impressive extent, luxuriant discography, amazing character - Marc-André Hamelin, a legend of contemporary piano, a model difficult to overcome in terms of virtuosity, but also interpretative vision, of an exemplary exigency with himself. In an older interview, the artist describes the ideal concert. "It's when I'm fit and everything is going very well. When I have the impression that I make no effort, only small adjustments from time to time, when I do not feel any obstacle between what I mentally propose and what results - the sound. The situation I am describing is related to the sensation of something full, being placed somewhere very high, in a high sphere. And see everything that happens in a detached state. It's like I'm a character in the room who hears the work the way he wants to hear it, and this happens maybe once every two years. To this I aspire, I reach it in varying degrees, sometimes 30 percent, 70 percent, sometimes 95 percent. "

Every appearance of pianist Marc-André Hamelin in Europe is considered an event. This time he is the guest of the Prague Radio Symphony Orchestra, in a new concert at the "Smetana" Hall, under the direction of Jonathan Darlington, of course having in the program two opuses of great virtuosity - "Totentanz" for piano and orchestra by Franz Liszt, composed in the late 1830s and revised in two stages, in 1853 and 1859. Visionary and at the level of technique and at the level of form, Liszt creates a monumental discourse, challenging any pianist, starting from this obsessive focus on the idea of death. It is a dance of death with its paraphrase after the Gregorian Dies Irae motif, the day of final judgment, the day of wrath… Liszt followed by Maurice Ravel - Concerto in D major for the left hand, a creation commissioned by pianist Paul Wittgenstein, who was crippled during the First World War. For Ravel, it was a challenge, a score that draws its sap from Franz Liszt's music, composed in a single part, elaborated as writing, without excluding some jazz effects and an implicit virtuosity… a program proposed by Marc-André Hamelin through which we will probably recognize once again his almost superhuman piano qualities (according to the New York Times).

In the second part of the concerto is scheduled the 5th Symphony op 67 in C minor "of Destiny" by Ludwig van Beethoven, a world in itself consisting of successive transformations of a theme consisting of four sounds. The reason was described by Anton Felix Schindler, Beethoven's biographer, simply: "Thus destiny knocks at your door." The Prague Radio Symphony Orchestra offers us a new reading of this consecrated opus of Viennese classicism under the baton of a British conductor - Jonathan Darlington, currently musical director of the Nuremberg Symphony Orchestra, a master who for 20 years has led the Vancouver Opera with great success - all these musical forces meeting in Prague for an unforgettable concert.