It was above all the Fourth Piano Concerto by Ludwig van Beethoven that became a career accelerator for Jan Lisiecki, one of the shooting stars among young pianists. In 2012, he stepped in at short notice in Bologna with the Orchestra Mozart under Claudio Abbado after Martha Argerich had cancelled. Four years later, the Canadian made his Carnegie Hall debut with this work, and finally, in a guest appearance at Tokyo’s Suntory Hall, he conducted an orchestra from the piano for the first time. “Concentration and tension form a special challenge in this concerto,” says Lisiecki.
In the meantime, he already performed the cycle several times and has all five concertos firmly in his repertoire. A cycle, really? “Beethoven certainly did not conceive these works as such. Nevertheless, they belong together because they show such a differentiated picture of the composer.” Now Lisiecki is daring an extraordinary feat: on two consecutive evenings in Wuppertal and Dortmund, he will present Beethoven’s masterworks at the Ruhr Piano Festival, conducting the Chamber Orchestra of Europe from the piano.