McDermott Plays Beethoven: The Middle Concertos

Academy of St Martin in the Fields Anne-Marie McDermott, piano

Orchestral Series

Thursday, June 25, 2026 at 6pm Gerald R. Ford Amphitheater

The Academy of St Martin in the Fields returns to open Bravo! Vail’s 39th Festival season with the first of two concerts featuring Beethoven’s Piano Concertos. Artistic Director Anne-Marie McDermott performs Concerto Nos. 2, 3, and 4.

Media Sponsor:

Harvey de Souza, director
Anne-Marie McDermott, piano

BEETHOVEN Piano Concerto No. 2
BEETHOVEN Piano Concerto No. 4
BEETHOVEN Piano Concerto No. 3

Pre-Concert Talk: Join us at 5:10 PM in the Gerald R. Ford Amphitheater Main Lobby for a pre-concert lecture.

All artists, programs, and pricing subject to change.

Ludwig Van Beethoven (1770-1827)

Beethoven’s Piano Concerto in
B-flat major was the earliest
of his five canonical piano
concertos to be composed.
He worked on it sporadically through
the decade of the 1790s and appears
to have premiered it on March 29,
1795, about the time he began
working on his Piano Concerto in
C major. But the C-major was the
first to be published, in March 1801,
which is why it is universally labelled
his Concerto No. 1 while the B-flatmajor Concerto, published about
nine months later, is known as his
Second. If the total truth be told, this
work really was Beethoven’s Piano
Concerto No. 2, since he did write one
earlier—a Concerto in E-flat major, a
work of only historical interest that
he penned in 1784 as a 13-year-old
prodigy growing up in Bonn, Germany.

Two years before that, his teacher,
Christian Gottlob Neefe, contributed a
glowing report of his pupil to Cramer’s
Magazine der Musik, noting that “he
plays the piano very skillfully and
with power, reads at sight very well,
and ... would surely become a second
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart if he were
to continue as he has begun.”
Beethoven knew at least some
of Mozart’s concertos intimately, and
in this piece he employs an orchestra
identical to that required by four of
Mozart’s late piano concertos. He
also sticks to a Mozartian norm in
general structure: three movements,
of which the first is a sonata form with
an orchestral exposition, the second a
lyrical slow movement, and the third a
rondo. In addition, the texture is truly
orchestral, following the Mozartian
ideal of an integrated texture in which
the piano plays the role of primus
inter pares. Nonetheless, within this
idealized scoring, soloists find plenty
to keep them busy; and if the finger work sounds not quite Mozartian, the
fact remains that the apple has not
fallen far from the tree.

Beethoven unveiled his Fourth
Piano Concerto at a private concert
in the mansion of his patron Prince
Franz Josef von Lobkowitz in March
1807. Then he put it away for nearly
two years and performed it only one
more time, at the marathon concert
on December 22, 1808, at Vienna’s
Theater an der Wien, which also
included the world premieres of his
Fifth and Sixth Symphonies, among
numerous other works.

Rather than the authoritarian
sounds of a full orchestra, the first
notes are played softly on the
piano, the gentle murmuring of a
theme based on repeated notes and
simple harmonies. And then—just as
surprising—following its five-measure
presentation of the thematic germ
of this movement, the piano simply
withdraws, not to be heard from again
for another 69 measures, during which
suspense mounts as to what is fueling
its behavior. The second movement is
extraordinary, too, even apart from its
uncharacteristic brevity (lasting only
about five minutes). The music theorist
Adolf Bernhard Marx, in his 1859
biography of Beethoven, suggested
that this Andante con moto bore some
relationship to Gluck’s opera Orfeo ed
Euridice—specifically, to how Orpheus
used music to tame wild beasts. More
recently, some musicologists have
argued that the movement is a point-for-point
musical narration of a version
of the Orpheus myth that was popular
in Viennese theatres. The finale brings
this essentially lyrical concerto to
an ebullient end, with trumpets and
timpani added for the first time.

Beethoven’s C-minor Piano
Concerto invites recollections of the
brooding, even despairing C-minor
Piano Concerto that Mozart composed
in 1786. During Mozart’s lifetime,
however, that work could be played
only from manuscript parts. It was
not published until 1800, the same
year Beethoven brought the first
movement of his own C-minor Piano
Concerto into reasonably finished
form. Beethoven was an admirer of the
Mozart work. Walking with the pianistand-composer Johann Baptist Cramer,
he overheard an outdoor performance
(or perhaps a rehearsal) of Mozart’s
C-minor Concerto. He is reputed to
have stopped in his tracks, called
attention to a particularly beautiful
motif, and exclaimed, with a mixture of
admiration and despondency, “Cramer,
Cramer! We shall never be able to
do anything like that!” One hears the
kinship in the aggressive opening of
the first movement of Beethoven’s
concerto, its principal theme being
terse and to-the-point. Already in the
first statement of that theme, the solo
piano rises to a high G, a note that was
newly available to pianists thanks to
recent advances in piano-building.
By the time Beethoven finished
the noble second movement and the
rather jaunty third, the composition
of the C-minor Concerto stretched
over some three and a half years, not
including preliminary sketches, which
reached back to 1796—plus a further
year if you count the time it took him
to actually write out the piano part,
and yet another five beyond that until
he wrote down the first-movement
cadenza. Neither of these last two was
necessary as long as Beethoven was
the soloist; he knew how the piece
should go, after all. Nonetheless, the
fragmentary state of the piano score
caused stress for his colleague Ignaz
von Seyfried, who served as pageturner at the premiere. “He gave me a
secret glance whenever he was at the
end of one of the invisible passages,”
Seyfried reported, “and my scarcely
concealable anxiety not to miss the
decisive moment amused him greatly
and he laughed heartily during the
jovial supper which we ate afterwards.”

Artist Biographies

Harvey de Souza

Anne-Marie McDermott

Photo Credit: Sophie Zhai

One of the most dazzling American pianists of her generation, Anne-Marie McDermott has played concertos, recitals, and chamber music in hundreds of cities throughout the United States, Europe, and Asia. She is one of the most versatile, respected, and best-reviewed pianists of our time. McDermott continues her tenure as music and artistic director of the Bravo! Vail Music Festival, in Colorado, through 2026, which hosts world-renowned artists and orchestras. She is also the artistic director of the Ocean Reef Chamber Music Festival, in Florida; the artistic director of the McKnight Center’s Chamber Music Festival, at Oklahoma State University; and a former curator of the Mainly Mozart Spotlight Series, in San Diego.

Highlights of McDermott’s 2025-26 season include a Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center tour of the United States, including Alice Tully Hall; Vancouver Symphony Orchestra, performing Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 2 and No. 4, with music director Otto Tausk; a performance with violinist Richard Lin at Rose Studio, with music by Mozart, Brahms, Fauré, and Paul Schoenfield; a tour of Spain and Portugal; Sociedad Filarmónica de Lima, Peru; Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra; and North Carolina Symphony, performing Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 5, “Emperor,” with music director Carlos Miguel Prieto.

Last season McDermott performed Amy Beach’s Piano Concerto with the Dallas Symphony Orchestra and with the Springfield Symphony Orchestra (MA); performed Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 4 with the Paducah Symphony Orchestra (KY); Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 1 with the Des Moines Symphony and Palm Beach Symphony; with the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center at Alice Tully Hall in New York City, and on tour in Chicago, Grand Rapids, Kansas City, Ashland (OR), and Vienna (VA). She also appeared in a special chamber music program at the New World Symphony, in Miami Beach, that included Messiaen’s wartime masterwork Quartet for the End of Time; performed as a member of the SPA Trio — with soprano Susanna Phillips and violist Paul Neubauer — at the Rockefeller University, and at Arizona Friends of Chamber Music; and in a chamber music program at the McKnight Center for the Performing Arts, in Stillwater (OK).

In previous seasons McDermott has performed with the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra and the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, both resulting in immediate re-engagements. She also performed Mozart with the New York Philharmonic at the McKnight Center in Stillwater. Other international highlights include recitals in France at the famed Piano aux Jacobins, in Toulouse; performances with the São Paulo Symphony Orchestra at the Cartagena International Music Festival; and an all-Haydn recital tour of China.

The breadth of McDermott’s repertoire ranges from Bach, Haydn, and Beethoven to Rachmaninoff, Prokofiev, and Scriabin, also including works by today’s most influential composers. McDermott is currently recording the complete Beethoven piano concertos with Mexico City’s illustrious Sinfónica de Minería, under conductor Carlos Miguel Prieto. She has also recorded the complete piano sonatas of Prokofiev, solo works by Chopin, Bach’s English Suites and Partitas (Editor’s Choice, Gramophone Magazine), and Gershwin’s complete works for piano and orchestra with the Dallas Symphony Orchestra (also Editor’s Choice, Gramophone Magazine). She released an album of Mozart concertos with the Calder Quartet that was praised as “exceptional on every count” by Gramophone Magazine. She has recorded five Haydn piano sonatas and two Haydn concertos with the Odense Philharmonic, in Denmark, including two cadenzas written by the late American composer Charles Wuorinen.

In recent years, McDermott participated in the New Century Chamber Orchestra’s Silver Jubilee all-Gershwin program and embarked on a cycle of Beethoven concertos at Santa Fe Pro Musica. She is currently recording the complete Beethoven piano concertos with Mexico City’s illustrious Orquesta Sinfónica de Minería, under the direction of Carlos Miguel Prieto. She also premiered and recorded a new concerto by the Danish composer Poul Ruders with the Vancouver Symphony, alongside Rachmaninoff’s Paganini Variations, and returned to play Gershwin with the New York Philharmonic at Bravo! Vail. Other recent highlights include performing the Mozart Concerto, K. 595 with the Philadelphia Orchestra, led by Sir Donald Runnicles; the Bach D minor concerto with members of the Philadelphia Orchestra; and Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No. 5 with the New York City-based Le Train Bleu.

McDermott continues to perform with many leading orchestras, including the New York Philharmonic, Minnesota Orchestra, Hong Kong Philharmonic, National Symphony Orchestra, Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, and the symphonies of Dallas, Seattle, Houston, Colorado, Pittsburgh, St. Louis, Atlanta, San Diego, New Jersey, Columbus, and Baltimore. She has also toured with the Australian Chamber Orchestra and the Moscow Virtuosi.

McDermott is a winner of the Mortimer Levitt Career Development Award for Women, the Young Concert Artists auditions, and an Avery Fisher Career Grant. She also received a 2024 Honorary Doctorate from the Manhattan School of Music, where she studied. She lives in New York City with her husband, Michael.

PRESTO CLUB: Presto Club Night: Youth ages 8-14 are invited to attend pre-concert activities and social lawn experience on this concert. Click here to learn more.