LPO: Brahms / Bruckner

None of his own creations brought Anton Bruckner quite the joy and pride that his Seventh Symphony did. It’s not only his most delicately etched orchestral creation, it’s also his most instantly beautiful – the perfect door-opening to our season-long exploration of the composer’s music. Captured in the work’s Adagio is a heartfelt eulogy for his ‘master’ Richard Wagner, which itself gives way to two of the most astonishingly impassioned and triumphant movements Bruckner ever conceived. It’s the intimacy of chamber music that proves most affecting in Brahms’s finely tuned Double Concerto – a remarkably structured piece in which violin and cello are cast as the most graceful and delicate foil to the richness of Brahms’s orchestra.