Elgar and Dvorak

Two great Romantic works, each with a very personal significance for their composer, are paired here in a concert of music that celebrates friendship and mourns loss.

Violinist Nicola Benedetti joins the BBC Symphony Orchestra and Chief Conductor Sakari Oramo for Elgar’s Violin Concerto – a work in which bravura technique and dazzling display meet confessional intimacy, one the composer himself described as ‘too emotional’. The concerto is paired with Dvořák’s Seventh Symphony, whose brooding opening movement and elegiac Adagio grew out of recent tragedy – the loss of the composer’s mother and the mental collapse of his friend and colleague Smetana.