Music without artifice with Anna Fedorova and Rune Bergmann

The concerts of the Franz Schubert Filharmonia marked one of those nights that define the meaning of a season. With sold-out halls, the Palau, the Teatre Tarragona, and the Auditori Enric Granados became the perfect setting for evenings to remember.

Under the direction of Rune Bergmann, the Franz Schubert Filharmonia became deeply emotionally involved, approaching Rachmaninoff and Sibelius without artifice, with truth, depth, and an absolutely sincere intensity.

The great emotional centre of the evening was Anna Fedorova. Her performance of Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 2 was striking: strength and delicacy, risk and control, absolute technique at the service of raw emotion. One of those balances achieved only by great pianists, capable of moving audiences without excess and impressing without ostentation. At the Franz Schubert Filharmonia, we are honoured by her friendship and hope she will return to our season very soon.

Rune Bergmann brought the evenings to a close with a powerful and organic reading, of great internal coherence, of Sibelius’s magnificent Fifth Symphony. The sections of the orchestra engaged in dialogue through delicate nuances and textures that painted for us the inner landscape of the Finnish composer.

There are concerts that pass by; there are others that remain in our memory. These will undoubtedly be among the latter.