Joy and James Lisney (cello and piano)

Bach’s awe-inspiring Chaconne takes centre stage in a programme with Brahms and Chopin from one of the UK’s most exciting cello and piano duos.

When Johannes Brahms stumbled upon Bach’s Chaconne in 1877, he couldn’t believe his eyes: ‘On one stave, for a small instrument, the man writes a whole world of the deepest thoughts and most powerful feelings. If I imagined that I could have created, even conceived the piece, I am quite certain that the excess of excitement and earth-shattering experience would have driven me out of my mind.’

Cellist Joy Lisney’s transcription of this work is a tour-de-force of instrumental ingenuity, musicianship and virtuosity.

The programme concludes with Brahms’s Regensonate in D; an intensely nostalgic work that Clara Schumann described as ‘blissful’ and ‘melancholic’ – music that she wanted to accompany her ‘at that passage from here to eternity’.