Rachmaninoff: Piano Concerto No. 3 | Khatia Buniatishvili, Neeme Järvi, Verbier Festival

Khatia Buniatishvili, Neeme Järvi and the Verbier Festival Orchestra perform Sergei Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 3 in D minor, Op. 30 at the Verbier Festival in 2011. Russian composer Sergei Rachmaninoff (1873 – 1943) wrote his third Piano Concerto in 1909 at the Ivanovka country estate 550 kilometers south east of Moscow. Rachmaninoff spent the summer months here from 1890 until his emigration to the US in 1917. The three movements of the piece recall the structure of typical solo concerts of the Romantic era. Piano Concerto No. 3 in D minor, Op. 30 was premiered by the New York Symphony Orchestra on November 28, 1909 in New York, conducted by Walter Damrosch. Rachmaninoff, who had been practicing the concert on a silent piano during his Atlantic voyage, played the solo part himself. As a child, pianist Khatia Buniatishvili, born in 1987 in Tblisi, Georgia, was considered a wunderkind. She began to play the piano at the age of three and gave her first concert with the Tblisi concert o