Probably no middle movement of a piano concerto by Wolfgang Amadé Mozart is more expressive than the F sharp minor Adagio of his KV 488 in A major. Even the unusually slow solo theme in the swaying Siciliano rhythm takes you into other spheres. The Korean Junhyung Kim, second prizewinner in the piano category at this year’s ARD music competition and winner of the audience prize, played it moving to tears in the second prizewinner’s concert in the Prinzregententheater. In doing so, he immediately followed up on Ludwig van Beethoven’s Piano Concerto in G major, which he also charismatically opened as a soloist with a few bars in the finale of the competition. How exuberantly full of life he then made the Mozart finale a happy finale with the in a good mood Munich Chamber Orchestra was the perfect counterpart and no less convincing.
The evening began with the concerto for alto trombone and strings by Johann Georg Albrechtsberger. The Australian Jonathon Ramsay, solo trombonist of the Munich Philharmonic, played the work, which is well known in every ARD music competition in this subject, solidly but rarely outstandingly in the intonation. And you could feel how much he would have liked to go beyond the cultivated classical framework and even go into fortissimo.
The Italian Mario Bruno, runner-up for the flutes, ran away from the Munich Chamber Orchestra several times in the first movement of the Concerto in G major Wq 169 by Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, but found himself and the music more and more in the second half of the Largo. The third-placed Chaos String Quartet played the twelve movements of Henri Dutilleux’s “Ainsi la nuit – Wie die Nacht”, completed in 1976, some of which were extremely short, with a high degree of expressivity, as in the first round, but not always with the required precision and so atmospherically dense and iridescent nocturnal somnambulist, as other ensembles succeed.