3. Classical Music on Sunday

This concert centres on music as imagination cast in sound. With his Scottish Fantasy, Max Bruch composed a violin concerto characterised by echoes of Scottish folk song melodies. Nevertheless, this virtuosic work demands the very best from the soloist. Young violinist Elias David Moncado transports the audience to the sounds of Scotland. He already has an international career to his name, having won prizes at several competitions and performed as a guest with many international orchestras and at numerous festivals. Among other things, he is a scholarship holder of the Anne-Sophie Mutter Foundation and regularly shares the stage with the famous violinist.

Franz Schubert also composed a fantasy, originally for piano four hands. As the work became very popular, it was intended to be performed also in concert halls, and Felix Mottl produced an orchestral version. However, the lively, effervescent character of the Scottish Fantasy is transformed into resignation and sorrow in the Piano Fantasy. Thus, here we see the two contrasting sides of the interpretation of the fantasy set against one another.

These two musical fantasies are framed by Louise Farrenc’s Overture No. 1 and Franz Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony. Farrenc, unusually for a woman in the 19th century, received composition lessons from Beethoven’s friend Anton Reicha and Johann Nepomuk Hummel. This enabled her to realise her dream of music filled with passion and imagination. Alongside her many piano works, her orchestral compositions reveal, above all, her fondness for wind instruments.

In his Symphony No. 7, Franz Schubert never finished composing his musical journey of the imagination, yet he still created one of his most significant works. It oscillates between ominous drama and the bliss of Walzerseligkeit.

There are no limits here to one’s own imagination as to how Schubert might well have completed his work.