Schumann: Piano Concerto

Programme also features: Weill: Mahagonny: Ein Songspiel; Schubert: Symphony No 9, ‘The Great’

‘Show me the way to the next whisky bar …’ Kurt Weill’s gloriously cynical Mahagonny Songspiel is under no illusions about the state of inter-war Germany. But Schubert’s Ninth Symphony opens up vast, sunlit new worlds, and Schumann’s Piano Concerto is pure Romantic poetry, especially in the incomparable hands of Mitsuko Uchida.

‘Schumann gets neglected so easily by the public,’ says Uchida. ‘I love him very much’. And when a pianist as great as she is plays this warm-hearted, remarkably intimate concerto, you’ll feel that love too. It’s an inspired choice of Sir Simon’s to follow it with the boundless energy and vaulting optimism of Schubert’s ‘Great’ C major symphony: a work that Schumann rescued from obscurity, and summed up with the word ‘heavenly’.