Dame Mitsuko Uchida plays Beethoven’s Third Piano Concerto with Vladimir Jurowski and the London Philharmonic in the week of the composer’s bicentenary.
Dame Mitsuko Uchida, winner of the International Beethoven Piano Competition, plays Beethoven’s Third Piano Concerto at the Royal Festival Hall on the South Bank on Wednesday 24 March 2027. Vladimir Jurowski conducts the London Philharmonic Orchestra.
Uchida was born in Atami, a seaside town near Tokyo, in 1948. She moved to Vienna at 12, when her father was posted there as Japan’s ambassador.
She studied at the Vienna Academy of Music and with Maria Curcio, the last pupil of Artur Schnabel, and won the Beethoven competition in 1969. Her complete recording of Mozart’s piano sonatas won a Gramophone Award in 1989, and she was made a Dame in 2009.
Uchida settled in London and took British citizenship. The concert falls two days before the 200th anniversary of Beethoven’s death, and it brings that anniversary to a hall in her adopted city.
Jurowski, the orchestra’s Conductor Emeritus, sets the C minor concerto, the darkest of Beethoven’s five, between the Prelude to Wagner’s Parsifal and Bruckner’s Seventh Symphony. Bruckner’s symphony became his requiem for Wagner, and the orchestra plays it in the Cohrs edition.