Skottland

They called it “Lisztmania”: audiences would scream, cheer and even faint with sheer excitement when they heard Franz Liszt playing the piano. He’s no longer available in person, but to hear the phenomenal Stephen Hough unleashing all his powers on Liszt’s demonic First Piano Concerto, is one of 21st century music’s most exhilarating experiences. You can’t really top that, so Thomas Dausgaard has placed it in a wonderfully appropriate context: the two youthful, richly coloured Orchestral Suites by Liszt’s fellow Hungarian, Béla Bartók.

The concert will be recorded for future broadcast on BBC Radio 3.

If you could hear silence, how would it sound? Maybe something like the massive stillness that opens Mahler’s First Symphony: the starting point for a young artist’s journey to the heart of absolute tragedy and glorious triumph. It’s one of those pieces that simply has to be experienced live, and as part of our ongoing Composer Roots project, we’ll uncover its origins in Jewish folk music with the klezmer band She’Koyokh. To open, an effervescent Broadway overture by Mahler’s great champion Leonard Bernstein and a magnificent rarity by a late-romantic master who shared Bernstein and Mahler’s Jewish heritage. In Ernest Bloch’s ‘Schelomo’, the solo cello is King Solomon, and its voice is his Song – by turns passionate, forthright, and uninhibitedly sensuous.

Prelude: 6.45pm in the Recital Room
Writer and broadcaster Gavin Plumley talks about Mahler’s complex musical roots, and how they influenced the First Symphony (free to ticket-holders, subject to seating availability).

The concert is scheduled to be broadcast live on BBC Radio 3.