One day, when the distinguished pianist Friedrich Gulda ran into Rudolf Buchbinder in a hotel lobby, he asked where the other was going. ‘To my concert of Beethoven’s cycle,’ Buchbinder said. Gulda asked him whether he was not tired of Beethoven, to which the pianist responded: ‘To be honest, the question is completely incomprehensible to me, because I always discover something new in such masterpieces.’
As the guest of the National Philharmonic, Buchbinder will play all of Beethoven’s piano concertos, with the same curiosity that has characterized his performing career for six decades. ‘You may overindulge and get bored of some foods. But you can never overindulge when it comes to playing the masterpieces of piano literature, even if you have performed them hundreds of times,’ he wrote in his memoir.