Brahms' Third Symphony

Mendelssohn, Brahms and one of classical music’s greatest radicals.

Child prodigy Felix Mendelssohn wrote Die schöne Melusine after attending an opera of the same name and deciding he could do a better job of writing the overture. History has proven him right. Though not as famous as his other waterscape, the Hebrides overture, this piece ripples with the same infectious melodies and stormy climaxes, brought together with an effortlessness and elegance typical of its composer.

Written half a century later, and at the height of his powers, Brahms’ Third Symphony was an immediate success at its premiere. This symphony is more intimate that its predecessors, full of delicate string writing and tender dialogues between wind instruments, while the third movement contains a horn solo for the ages – one of the most beautifully yearning melodies he ever wrote.

Mezzo-soprano Sophie Bevan is the soloist for the concert’s passionate, lovelorn core. A quarter of a century before anybody else, Berlioz pioneered the orchestral song-cycle in this setting of break-up poems by fellow Romantic (and Parisian neighbour) Théophile Gautier. In Gautier’s own words, Les nuits d’été contains ‘tumultuous Shakespearean depth of passion, amorous or melancholy dreaminess, longings and questings of the soul … and that something more than all which escapes language but may be divined in music’.

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