Camerata Salzburg, Hélène Grimaud at Philharmonie Berlin

About the Event

She has loved Johannes Brahms' D minor concerto ever since she heard it for the first time as a 13‐year‐old: it was an experience that fundamentally changed her, Hélène Grimaud said in a recent interview. She has already recorded the concerto twice on CD and therefore has a particularly close relationship with this work, which Brahms began as a sonata at the age of 21 and later transformed into a large‐scale piano concerto that challenges the conventions of its genre. Grimaud is fascinated by the deeply personal character of the work: “It seems to me as if he wrote it ‘in the first person’. It seems as if a detailed memoir has been laid out before us.”

The Frenchwoman, whose global career has now lasted 30 years, is equally interested in other fields of activity alongside music: she has distinguished herself as a human rights activist and author of several novels, and her commitment to wolves threatened with extinction is legendary. For Grimaud, however, making music remains the medium through which she can express herself most fully.