Overview

Brahms’s Violin Concerto is an irresistible draw when visionary soloist Augustin Hadelich is on the bill. Though the work’s success was hard-won, it has since become impossible to imagine the Romantic violin repertoire without it. Esteemed Scottish conductor Donald Runnicles leads two equally compelling, if undersung British offerings. Vaughan Williams’s Symphony No. 5, completed in 1943, turns away from the global turmoil of World War II toward a musical utopia reminiscent of the “green and pleasant land” celebrated by William Blake. From the pastoral to the urban, via Elgar’s Cockaigne Overture, which describes several scenes in London.