With a powerful Beethoven concert, the Mülheim symphony concert series went into its summer break on Sunday evening. The seventh and final concert of the season featured two famous, significant, and magnificent works: Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 3 and his Symphony No. 3 “Eroica.”
A wonderful interpretation of high sonic quality was delivered by the visiting Württemberg Chamber Orchestra Heilbronn, which delighted the audience under its chief conductor Risto Joost with a contrasting, effective, and well-balanced “Eroica.” After the opening, which might have benefited from a bit more airy lightness, Joost drew from his 35 musicians beautiful chamber-like passages, strong dynamic contrasts, and striking accents. Depending on the tempo, the music sounded at times crisp and concise, then lively and cheerful, then dark and profound (in the funeral march), and finally epic and expansive in the narrative finale—always finely balanced. With his calm, unpretentious, and precise conducting, Risto Joost inspired the orchestra to produce a rich, immersive sound.
Pianist and orchestra captivate Mülheim with masterful playing
That the orchestra is capable of more than grand symphonic gesture it proved in the ensuing piano concerto, where it could also hold back and become an equal dialogue partner for the magnificent Herbert Schuch at the piano. Schuch has long—and rightly—been praised for his pianistic mastery, which he demonstrated impressively in Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 3: technically perfect, full of inspiration, precise yet expressive and virtuosic. He gripped the audience with a nuanced touch and his multifaceted way of shaping, phrasing, and making long musical arches audible.
A roller coaster of moods emerged: the “fateful key” of C minor, the dense, dark Largo, cheeky short appoggiaturas and sharp contrasts underlined the music’s energetic message. By contrast, the lyrical melodicism, the hand‑in‑hand of soloist and orchestra, and the cadenzas’ playful music‑box character formed the bright counterpart. The transitions from solo to tutti succeeded wonderfully—everything flowed into a tension‑filled narrative.
Ravishing encores on a truly great concert evening
With Schubert’s elegiac Impromptu in G‑flat major, Herbert Schuch offered another sample of his dense, cantabile and vividly pictorial art of interpretation—simply enchanting. So too the string encore “Melodie” by the Estonian composer Lydia Auster: an intense sound carpet, a “melodia lunga” of swelling and subsiding harmonies that rub against one another and then resolve. A truly great concert evening.