Moscow nights

There’s a good reason why Rachmaninoff’s Second Piano Concerto is one of the world’s favourite classics. Like any true classic, it always sounds new – and in the hands of a pianist as insightful and skilled as the young British superstar Benjamin Grosvenor, it will never have sounded fresher. Conductor Alondra de la Parra will bring her signature verve to an all-Russian programme that begins with Glinka’s firecracker of an overture, and ends in the triumph of Tchaikovsky’s unashamedly autobiographical Fifth Symphony: music that the composer wanted to be played ‘with passion and desire’.