Northern Sinfonia with Grant Llewellyn

Grant Llewellyn: Conductor
Jean-Frederic Neuburger: Piano
Richard Martin: Trumpet

Owing to an unforeseen personal commitment in Caracas, Christian Vasquez has been forced at short notice to withdraw from his upcoming debut with Northern Sinfonia. Christian extends his apologies to the management, musicians and audience at The Sage Gateshead and hopes to be able to fulfil his debut at a future date.

We are delighted and grateful that Grant Llewellyn has agreed to step in at short notice for our final Classic FM Series concert. The first half of the programme will feature Prokofiev's Classical Symphony and Shostakovich's first Piano Concerto and for the second half of the concert we have replaced Bizet's Symphony in C with Beethoven's "Pastoral" symphony.

Manchester Camerata - Portrait of Love

Gábor Takács-Nagy - conductor
Anna Stephany mezzo soprano

A portrait of works by composers struck by the love bug. The muse for Webern's uncharacteristically lush early Slow Movement was Wilhelmine Mörtl, his future wife. Brahms' Liebeslieder Waltzes explore love in all its shapes and forms. Dvorak's Love Songs, in an arrangement here by David Matthews, are all settings of romantic poems by Gustav Pfleger-Moravsky. Souvenir de Florence by Tchaikovsky, king of melodies, was dedicated to his mystery patron, Nadezhda von Meck, whom he never actually met.