Budapest Festival Orchestra Finzi, Brahms, Berlioz

British composer Gerald Finzi is best known for his choral works. This concert will be the first time his piece The Fall of the Leaf is performed in Hungary, where his music is hardly ever played. Finzi, who lived through both world wars and fled the din of the city to grow apples in the countryside, pours the sadness, sombre lyricism and pastoral calm that is typical of his entire oeuvre into this elegy. Although The Fall of the Leaf was originally created as part of a chamber symphony, i...t eventually took on its final form as a symphonic piece.
'I have had the happy notion of writing a concerto for violin and cello,' wrote Brahms to Clara Schumann. The aim of the double concerto was to appease his old friend the violin virtuoso József Joachim, with whom Brahms had fallen out for a time over a personal conflict. The piece, in which the cello part symbolises Brahms and the violin part Joachim, achieved the desired effect. The two participants in the dialogue - in life as in the work - again found a common note. Taking the stage to play it this time will be two Norwegian soloists: the 'utterly enchanting' Vilde Frang and Truls Mørk, who 'amaze the audience from the first note to the last.'
Sir Mark Elder, who self-deprecatingly labels his conducting style as 'sweaty', is indeed taking on a sweat-inducing task. Berlioz's Symphonie fantastique was the first successful Romantic response to the symphonies of Beethoven. Set to an extensive narrative programme, the work was inspired by Berlioz's own failure in love: the leitmotif symbolising the beloved woman emerges in each of the movements.