Afternoon Performance: Elgar Symphony No.1 by Schumann, Elgar, Bartók, From (2019/2019), Conductor Thomas Dausgaard, City Halls, Glasgow, United Kingdom

Elgar wouldn’t say if his First Symphony told a story – merely that “it expressed a wide experience of human life with a great charity (love) and a massive hope in the future”. But the British public knew a masterpiece when they heard one, and when it was premiered in 1908, the audience leapt to its feet and cheered. Thomas Dausgaard brings a uniquely fresh approach to a late-Romantic epic like no other, paired here today with Bartók’s vivid musical postcards from Transylvania, and the poetry, tenderness and heart-on-sleeve romance of the Piano Concerto by Robert Schumann. There’s a good reason why pianist Elisabeth Leonskaja is revered by her fellow musicians: and you’re about to hear it.