Artist Portrait: Håkan Hardenberger | London Symphony Orchestra

Brahms’s most lyrical symphony meets three composers who continue to redefine the power of sound, in this Artist Portrait concert featuring Håkan Hardenberger.

Not every revolution is noisy. Wagner’s Lohengrin prelude and Ligeti’s mind-expanding skyscape both break music down to its elements to create sonorities that defy the imagination; Betsy Jolas, meanwhile, says that she creates music from ‘the sounds we try not to hear’. Together, they make a compelling upbeat to Brahms’s sunniest symphony.

Brahms wrote his Second Symphony while on holiday in the Austrian Alps, but as Rattle has said, it’s ‘far from conventional’, and Brahms’s way of shaping and colouring a melody is as individual (and as expressive) as anything that followed him. And with soloists of the calibre of Roger Muraro and Håkan Hardenberger, in an Artist Portrait concert celebrating the trumpeter’s 60th birthday, Betsy Jolas’s True Stories will be like giving your ears a reboot. Once you’ve heard it, everything sounds different.