The Full Works Concert - Thursday 7 August, 8pm

Jane Jones presents masterpieces from Elgar, Brahms, Albeniz and Haydn.

There’s a definite summery feeling to tonight’s programme, with sunny guitar music and the lush Introduction and Allegro for strings by Elgar (pictured), inspired by a bracing trip to the Cardiganshire coast. Elgar had heard a distant choir but stashed the tune away for a possible ‘Welsh Rhapsody’ of some sort. In the end, the Welsh piece never came, so he borrowed the tune for this work, which features both a string quartet and a string orchestra. 

We’ll also hear a superb recording of Brahms’s Piano Concerto No.1. The work was written over a full four-year period, Brahms at pains to prove that he was able to transfer his chamber-music successes into this altogether grander form. Unfortunately, his worst fears were realised. The piece was dismissed by those in the know and, in its day, it was never held in such high esteem as other Romantic piano concertos of the period. Now, however, it’s a very different story: this is one of the best-loved and most frequently performed piano concertos in the world.
 

Edward Elgar: Introduction & Allegro for Strings Opus 47
Colin Davis conducts the London Symphony Orchestra 

Johannes Brahms: Piano Concerto No.1 in D minor Opus 15
Piano: Hélène Grimaud
Andris Nelsons conducts the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra

Isaac Albeniz: Asturias
Guitar: Milos Karadaglic

Joseph Haydn: Symphony No.103 in E-flat major
Adam Fischer conducts the Austro-Hungarian Haydn Orchestra