Fresh off the heels of the London premiere of John Adams’ new piano concerto Must the Devil Have All the Good Tunes? with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Yuja Wang returns to Barbican’s Milton Court Concert Hall for a sold-out second concert as part of her Barbican Artist Spotlight this season. On November 21, the formidable clarinetist Andreas Ottensamer joins Ms. Wang for her series. Last season saw the release of Mr. Ottensamer’s Deutsche Grammophon album – Blue Hour, a collaboration with Ms. Wang, Mariss Jansons and the Berlin Philharmonic featuring works by Weber, Brahms, and Mendelssohn.
The concert program is built around the two clarinet sonatas written by Brahms, then Debussy tests both technique and tone in his Première Rhapsodie, and Ottensamer offers his own arrangements of three of Mendelssohn’s Songs without Words, their lyricism translating superbly from piano to clarinet. At the Edinburgh International Festival in August 2019, The Scotsman raved about their “instinctive musical partnership” that was “liquidly expressive, intoxicating.” For more information and purchase links of the album Blue Hour, click here. Yuja returns to Barbican Hall in 2020 for a chamber recital with cellist Gautier Capuçon on January 13 and a solo recital on March 31.