Tchaikovsky’s Fifth by Vasilyevich Rachmaninoff, Mozart, Tchaikovsky, P. I., Aπό (2016/2016), αγωγός Matthias Pintscher, City Halls, Glasgow, United Kingdom

For Tchaikovsky, Mozart was “the Christ of music” – a vision of beauty and purity that he could never hope to match. And Mozart’s Piano Concerto No.12 certainly makes a wondrously intimate contrast to the epic struggle and heady passions of Tchaikovsky’s deliriously romantic Fifth Symphony, to say nothing of Rachmaninov’s atmospheric study in musical monochrome, The Isle of the Dead. But there are some startling surprises beneath Mozart’s lace cravat; and if anyone can draw them out, it’s pianist extraordinaire Cédric Tiberghien, just as BBC SSO Artist-in-Association Matthias Pintscher will bring a composer’s insight to Rachmaninov and Tchaikovsky’s two landmarks of Russian romanticism.