View the Program Notes for this series. Esteemed Austrian pianist Rudolf Buchbinder joins the BSO for Brahms's vast, emotionally intense D minor piano concerto, which the Viennese composer wrote over the course of several years, in part as a reaction to the tragedy of his mentor Robert Schumann's attempted suicide in 1854 and his death two years later. Brahms-still only in his mid-twenties-was soloist in the concerto's premiere in January 1859. The great Danish composer Carl Nielsen chose to write his Fourth Symphony, an expression of the "Elemental Will of Life," in one large movement. He prefaced this questing 1916 score with a telling aphorism: "Music is Life, and, like it, is Inextinguishable."