Past concerts

Tickets: £17, £15, £10 (concessions £3 off)

Tickets will be available to purchase at the door before the concert starts.

Berlioz captures the essence of Shakespeare’s comedy, Much Ado About Nothing, in this delightful Overture, much of it in the playful introduction, where the silences are as witty as the dialogue between woodwind and strings.   It is a sparkling introduction to the tale of love gone wrong–and love gone right.

The exuberant, brash Piano Concerto No. 3 drew thunderous applause from American audiences in 1921 but it received rather tepid reviews. Neither in Chicago nor in subsequent New York performances did the concerto arouse much enthusiasm.  Prokofiev said the American public "did not quite understand the work."  Nevertheless, it went on to become one of the half a dozen or so most popular piano concertos of the entire twentieth century.

Similarly, the premiere in 1885 of Brahms’s Symphony No. 4 had a cool reception.  Audiences found the symphony’s strangeness difficult to deal with on first acquaintance.  Its strangeness lies in its combination of modern (for 1885) harmonies and suggestions of old music (in particular the passacaglia in the final movement).  Now the symphony is firmly a concert favourite.

Tickets: £22, £18, £14 (concessions £3 off)

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Danses Concertantes looks and sounds like a ballet score; officially, however, it is a concert piece. It hails from Stravinsky’s neoclassical period when he worked to establish an artistic link with the formal and contrapuntal structures of eighteenth-century music. Written in Hollywood in the winter of 1941-1942, the work received its premiere in Los Angeles in the February.

Haydn's Cello Concerto No. 1 in C Major, composed around 1761-1765, was presumed lost for two hundred years until in 1961, a copy of the score was discovered at the Prague National Museum. The Concerto has since become a staple of the cello repertoire.

We conclude this performance with Mozart’s Symphony No. 40, which needs no introduction. The summer of 1788, when this, along with his other last two symphonies, were composed, was not a good time for Mozart. He was beset with by financial troubles, declining popularity, illness of his wife, and the failure of his opera, Don Giovanni. Notwithstanding this, he completed all three symphonies in lightning speed over a ten-week period. For some time, it was believed that Mozart never heard a performance of No. 40, although today there is some evidence that there was at least one performance during his lifetime conducted by Salieri.