Poschner, Albanese & Bruckner Orchester Linz

International Brucknerfest Linz 2025. Concerto macabre. Markus Poschner, the Bruckner Orchestra Linz and pianist Giuseppe Albanese have exciting rarities by composers such as Bernard Herrmann, Miklós Rózsa and Erich Wolfgang Korngold in their luggage.

The boundaries between cinema and concerto are blurred. At least in the works on the programme, for which the Italian pianist Giuseppe Albanese returns to the Brucknerhaus Linz to fuse two one-movement piano concertos into one whole together with Markus Poschner and the Bruckner Orchestra Linz. For the Spellbound Concerto Miklós Rózsa used his Oscar-winning music for the film of the same name by Alfred Hitchcock, who had initially asked Bernard Herrmann. However, the latter was already working on his Concerto macabre, the performance of which forms the dramatic final scene of the film Hangover Square also released in 1945.

In contrast, there is Erich Wolfgang Korngold's Symphony in F sharp, with which the composer, who had become a Hollywood star after emigrating to the USA, wanted to prove himself in the concert hall again. Like Korngold himself, the piece oscillates between Los Angeles and Vienna, effective film music and complex symphonic music, making it, in the words of conductor Dmitri Mitropoulos, "the perfect work of modernism".