As part of the Rising Stars programme launched by the European Concert Hall Organisation (ECHO) in 1995, the concert halls that make up the organisation each year send out a new crop of talented young musicians and ensembles on a European concert tour that, for some years now, has given the Müpa Budapest audience the chance to get to know them.
The Müpa Budapest audience will get the chance to welcome a German-Korean piano phenomenon in the person of Christopher Park, who through his teacher is the immensely promising heir to both Wilhelm Kempff's German and Lev Oborin's Russian schools of piano playing. His first album, which was released by a major label, features works by Russian composers and opens, for example, with the work of Stravinsky's, Three Movements, to be played here, which places extraordinary demands on the performer. Park has already appeared with distinguished orchestras and won several awards, including earning the Leonard Bernstein Award at the prestigious Schleswig-Holstein Music Festival in 2014. He also won a special prize at the similarly prestigious Rheingau Festival on the grounds that his playing combined solid technical skills with convincing musical power, and he enchanted the jury with his winning presence.
Brahms was 28, roughly the same age Christopher Park is now, when he wrote the series of variations, crowned with a bravura fugue, that constitute the large-scale - lasting around half an hour - work from 1861 being played at the concert. Featured between the two classical works on the programme will be a piece written specifically for the Rising Stars programme by Austrian contemporary composer Olga Neuwirth, whose works have been played in New York, Paris and London, and premièred by some of the most renowned conductors and performers. In 2002, along with Pierre Boulez, she was elected the resident composer at the Lucerne Festival.

Nominated for the Rising Stars programme by: Wiener Konzerthaus & Musikverein Wien

Presented by: Mupa Budapest