Gulda & Mozart

«If you want to fly float with me, / Let the earth quake to the beat»:  thus reads the epitaph on the gravestone of the unforgettable Friedrich Gulda. A quarter-century has passed since the death of the pianist and composer; he would be 95 today. In his captivating cello concerto, Gulda has classical forms and figures meet jazz, pop, rock and (pseudo-) folk music. At the time this was still scandalous, but for the South Korean cellist Jaemin Han, born in 2006 and making his Tonkunstler debut with this concerto, such stylistic freedom goes without saying. Even a composer, conductor and teacher of such renown as Erich Urbanner has experienced or helped cause the odd furore over his some 90 years of life. He has remained loyal to the goal of creating musical stories that set virtuosic challenges for their performers and grip the audience – for example in his «Konzertante Formen» («Concertante Forms»). This is joined by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s splendid «Linz Symphony», in which not a single bar betrays the fact that the work was written «headlong» in just a few days in 1783. In this programme Fabien Gabel celebrates some very different facets of Austrian music.