Pianist Martin Helmchen grateful for his ongoing partnership with the CSO

When German pianist Martin Helmchen made his Chicago Symphony Orchestra debut with Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 2 in 2016, he already felt at home with the ensemble, since he knew some of the musicians from previous chamber-music collaborations. Over the past decade, this relationship has deepened through his performances of two Mozart concertos in 2022 and 2023, along with a Symphony Center Presents Piano recital in 2018.

“These are probably my greatest memories of my concerts in the U.S.,” Helmchen said in a recent interview. “I’ve not had an ongoing relationship like this, a constant kind of partnership, with any other orchestra outside of Europe.”

On May 28-31, Helmchen will return to the CSO as the soloist in Brahms’ Piano Concerto No. 1, with Nikolaj Szeps-Znaider on the podium. The program, which also features Richard Strauss’ Suite from Der Rosenkavalier and Ravel’s La valse, marks Helmchen’s first performances of a Brahms concerto with any U.S. orchestra. It also will be his first collaboration with Szeps-Znaider in the role of conductor, though he once performed a Dvořák piano quartet with Szeps-Znaider on violin at the Jerusalem Chamber Music Festival.

His previous CSO engagements “are probably my greatest memories of my concerts in the U.S. I’ve not had an ongoing relationship like this, a constant kind of partnership, with any other orchestra outside of Europe.” — Martin Helmchen

One of Brahms’ early compositions, the First Piano Concerto began as a sonata for two pianos and evolved through several forms, eventually becoming the German composer’s first-performed orchestral work. Brahms, then 25 years old, appeared as the soloist in its 1859 premiere, which was poorly received by the audience and the press. Eventually finding a better reception, the piece is now considered a masterwork for piano and orchestra, as is Brahms’ Second Piano Concerto, which premiered in 1881.

“The Brahms concertos are always a very special peak in a landscape full of peaks,” Helmchen said. “They have this very Olympic feeling to them.”

Helmchen also noted that the First Piano Concerto is one of the most personal compositions by Brahms, who tended to be reserved about any biographical connections in his music. He began writing the piece in 1854, shortly after a suicide attempt by his friend and mentor, Robert Schumann, and finished it several years after Schumann’s death in 1856.

“Because it was so connected with the death of Robert Schumann, you can hear the despair of something life-changing, life-shattering, happening in the opening of the first movement,” Helmchen said.

Clara Schumann, with whom Brahms was also close, inspired the second movement, which Brahms described in a letter as a “tender portrait” of the older pianist and composer. With its chorale theme, this movement also has “a very religious feeling to it,” Helmchen said.

The “extremely Brahmsian third movement” goes through “so many languages and motives, and each of them is immediately recognizable as [what] can only be Brahms,” he said. “It’s almost like a concerto in itself, although it is not very long.”

Reflecting on the work’s significance for pianists, Helmchen said, “It’s one of these desert island pieces that every pianist loves from their youth onwards, and which will stay a special task for whoever plays this until the end of your life. It’s one of these pieces that are so big and so deep in content that they keep developing; you can’t really play them the same over the span of your life.”

In addition to his regular engagements as a soloist, Helmchen performs a great deal of chamber music, often alongside his wife, cellist Marie-Elisabeth Hecker. He also teaches chamber music at the Kronberg Academy, where he has been an associate professor since 2010.

Helmchen takes a holistic approach to the various genres of piano repertoire — solo, chamber, lieder, orchestral — rather than separating them into boxes. “It’s all so connected, and if you really get into the language and the internal world of a composer, you can’t live with only one branch of the repertoire. You have to get to know everything,” he said. This is especially true for the music of Brahms, whose “chamber music’s weight and significance in the repertoire is just as big as the symphonic or piano solo repertoire. [The genres are] really very fruitful for each other.”

Helmchen’s major ongoing projects encompass solo and chamber repertoire from other titans of Austro-Germanic music. For the last two years, he has been working toward complete recordings of all 20 Schubert piano sonatas, including the so-called unfinished sonatas; he plans to perform them in a cycle during the 2027/28 season, which marks the 200th anniversary of Schubert’s death. He’s also in the process of recording a Beethoven cycle with Hecker for the composer’s upcoming bicentennial.

Together, these undertakings require mastering a mammoth amount of music, but “this is extremely satisfying and fulfilling work,” Helmchen said. “That’s a pianist’s joy.”