Jung-Ho Pak, Conductor Malcolm Bilson, Fortepiano

Wolfgang Mozart - The genius and glorious music of Mozart, the man brought to life in the famous stage play and the academy award-winning film “Amadeus,” is celebrated in this illuminating and moving tribute. A lively curtain raiser, Mozart’s effervescent Overture to The Marriage of Figaro sets the stage in the composer’s superb style by creating a musical tension between sections before culminating in a grand crescendo. In the Piano Concerto No. 19, Mozart’s balance of expression is evident again in the wonderful interplay between piano and the winds and strings – authentically played by pianist Malcolm Bilson on a fortepiano, an 18th-century version of the piano modeled after Mozart’s own. Complex in its intensity and mood, Symphony No. 40 stands as one of Mozart’s most creative works as well as a manifestation of his most personal voice.

Malcolm Bilson, Fortepiano - Hailed as the "exemplary Mozart pianist of our time" by the New York Review of Books, Malcolm Bilson is an American pianist specializing in performance on the fortepiano. Bilson teaches at Cornell University in Ithaca, NY, where he is the Frederick J. Whiton Professor of Music. He has been in the forefront of the period-instrument movement for over 30 years as a performer of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert on late 18th- and early 19th-century pianos. Since then he has proven to be a key contributor to the restoration of the fortepiano to the concert stage and to fresh recordings of the "mainstream" repertory. Bilson is known for his series of recordings (on the Archiv label) of Mozart’s piano concertos. www.arts.cornell.edu/music/faculty/Bilson.html