Rattle Conducts Schubert and Berg

Music from the heart: Sir Simon Rattle, Leonidas Kavakos and the London Symphony Orchestra swing from profound sorrow to boundless joy, with Viennese classics by Schubert and Berg. Schubert’s ‘Great’ C major symphony didn’t get its nickname for anything, and this vast, sunlit voyage through the Romantic imagination is one of those pieces that just sweeps you away. Berg’s Violin Concerto is at the opposite emotional extreme – absolute sorrow distilled into almost unbearable beauty, and dedicated ‘to the memory of an angel’. It’s played today by Leonidas Kavakos. ‘I doubt if there is more than a handful of violinists alive who can match Kavakos’ wrote Gramophone, and when the LSO played this concerto with him in 2012, the Daily Telegraph praised his ‘heroic strength and purity of tone … with everything aspiring towards a celestial purity’. We’ve all been through a lot since then: just another reason to suspect that this performance will be something very special indeed.