Michael Seal, conductor
Alexandra Dariescu, piano

Corinthian Orchestra returns to Southbank Centre's Queen Elizabeth Hall with a popular programme of Tchaikovsky and Berlioz.

Tchaikovsky's joyful Capriccio Italien - a fantasy for orchestra written when the composer spent three months in Rome in 1880 - sets the performance off in high spirits. Romanian born British pianist Alexandra Dariescu makes her Corinthian Orchestra debut in Tchaikovsky's equally virtuosic, expressive and romantic Piano Concerto No. 1.

Bewitching images abound in Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique - a wild musical ride that takes us from bucolic landscapes to the furious dances of a witches’ sabbath.

Composed in 1830, the spine-tingling piece - the 27-year-old composer’s first symphony - was inspired by his experience of opium and obsession with the actress Harriet Smithson; the fourth movement, he claimed, completed over the course of a single night.