The Full Works Concert: Friday 27 March 2015

The Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra perform Mozart’s Piano Concerto No.27, Elgar’s Second Symphony and Strauss’s Horn Concerto No.2.

Tonight Classic FM continues its year-long celebration of the 175th anniversary of the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra.

The concert opens with Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 27 in B-flat major. First performed early in 1791, the year of the composer's death, its premiere may well have been Mozart's last appearance in a public concert. He scored the work for flute, two oboes, two bassoons, two horns, solo piano and strings, which makes it thinner than Mozart's other late concertos. 

Elgar called his Second Symphony 'the passionate pilgrimage of the soul'. He dedicated this majestic work to the memory of the late King Edward VII but created a deeply personal symphony. "I have written out my soul in the concerto, Symphony No. 2 and the Ode and you know it," he wrote to a friend. "In these three works I have shewn myself."

Written in Vienna in 1943, Richard Strauss's Horn Concerto No.2 was the composer’s first full concerto since his First Horn Concerto, written all of 60 years earlier. Despite being 78, Strauss was still composing at the peak of his powers, demonstrating in this work his enormous skill and invention for an instrument that he had heard played by his own father from his earliest years. 

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart: Piano Concerto No.27 in B-flat major
Piano: Jean-Philippe Collard
Rinaldo Alessandrini conducts the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra

Edward Elgar: Symphony No.2 in E-flat major
Vasily Petrenko conducts the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra

Richard Strauss: Horn Concerto No.2
Horn: Timothy Jackson
Vasily Petrenko conducts the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra