Julia Fischer plays Brahms

Tchaikovsky’s explosive Manfred Symphony meets the sunlit warmth of Brahms’s Violin Concerto. Manfred is an outsider – a purposeless spirit, tormented by impossible desires and driven into the wilderness by a society whose conventions he rejects. Tchaikovsky sensed a kindred spirit in Byron’s brooding anti-hero, and his explosive Manfred Symphony contains some of the most uncompromising (and the most tender) music he ever wrote. Edward Gardner adores it, but it’s a hard act to follow. So we’re beginning the concert with the serene melodies and sunlit warmth of Brahms’s Violin Concerto, played tonight by a good friend of the LPO – Julia Fischer, a violinist who lives every note she plays.