Camerata Academica Salzburg with Rudolf Buchbinder, Arts Festival, Sha Tin Town Hall, February 28 Viennese pianist Rudolf Buchbinder sets himself extraordinary challenges over which he routinely triumphs with astonishing ease. On Friday evening he played not one, not two, but three of Beethoven's piano concertos: the second, third and fourth. And, dispensing with one of the concert hall's greatest scourges, he conducted from the keyboard.
That he played and conducted the entire concert from memory is a noteworthy achievement. But it is also important because it alters - in profound and subtle ways - a soloist's relationship with the music and the audience.
The orchestra's relationship with the score, too, is significantly modified when it plays without a conductor. The intense interaction between pianist and orchestra gives way to the constant give and take characteristic of, for example, a piano quartet. And its success requires a special kind of orchestral player.
If the decision to dispense with a conductor meant that Buchbinder's entries, especially in the cadenzas, were nearly always a fraction too early it was more than compensated for by beautifully-shaped phrases and teamwork of rare precision.
He is a pianist whose phenomenal facility and accuracy allow him to savour moments of irony and humour which all but the uninitiated seem to miss in Beethoven.
The Camerata Academica is an orchestra of modern-instrument players with a particular sense of commitment to style. The players are young and their performances reveal a rare attention to ensemble. Under Buchbinder's influence they achieve an authenticity which grows from their Viennese origins rather than a pedantic academicism.
