Abbado conducts Prokofiev & Mahler - with Yuja Wang

The 2009 Lucerne Festival offered a thrilling coming together of generations, joining the 22-year-old Yuja Wang with the 76-year-old veteran Claudio Abbado. The young pianist, making her festival debut, masters the almost superhuman technical demands of Prokofiev's Third Piano Concerto with formidable effortlessness, while flawlessly maneuvering the witty and dreamlike passages of the work. To follow, Abbado, perhaps the most admired conductor at the time, leads his Lucerne Festival Orchestra with a light hand through Mahler's romantic First Symphony – the musical journey of human life in four stages: from the upsurge of feelings, through desire and suffering, to the end of earthly existence and the entrance to paradise.

Soloist: 

Yuja Wang (Piano)

Ensemble: 

Lucerne Festival Orchestra

Conductor: 

Claudio Abbado