Salzburg Festival: Opening Concert 2008

Put one of the world’s greatest orchestras in the hands of one of the foremost specialists of 20th century music, add a soloist who is one of today’s leading pianists and conductors, and you are assured of a concert of superlatives that pays glowing tribute to three major works of the past century. The official Salzburg Festival opening concert of the Wiener Philharmoniker is conducted by Pierre Boulez, once the ‘enfant terrible’ of the musical world, now a sensitive, analytical conductor of works from the 19th and 20th centuries. Combining Béla Bartók’s Piano Concerto No. 1 – Daniel Barenboim is the soloist – with Maurice Ravel’s ‘Valses nobles et sentimentales’ and Igor Stravinsky’s ‘Firebird’ ballet in its full-length version of 1910, Boulez weaves a compelling musical texture that uncovers the links among the three works and the three composers.