BBC Philharmonic with Vassily Sinaisky and Pavel Kolesnikov (piano)

Beethoven’s Third Piano Concerto owed a significant debt to Mozart, notably his dark and brooding Piano Concerto No 24, which Beethoven particularly admired. But the Third Concerto also marks a point of departure from Mozart’s Classical soundworld, its taut and cohesive structure allied to a revolutionary shift in the concerto’s range made possible by the advances in piano technology. The exciting young Siberian virtuoso Pavel Kolesnikov, recently a BBC New Generation Artist, offers Nottingham a first glimpse of his brilliance.

Written at the height of his powers, between 1878-1888, Tchaikovsky’s Manfred was his most ambitious orchestral work. At first reluctant to take on Lord Byron’s epic tragic poem, the composer faced his own titanic struggle in translating its awe-inspiring alpine setting and Manfred’s larger-than-life hero into symphonic form. But the outcome was one of Romanticism’s most impressive statements, the extremity of Byron’s verse, which the poet himself described as being of “a very wild, metaphysical, and inexplicable kind”, expressed in music that’s both powerfully evocative and thrillingly virtuosic.

Free pre-concert talk, 6.30pm in the auditorium: Tim Jones introduces the programme.