This sandwich of a concert offers the audience two emblematic 19th-century German orchestral works wrapped around a brilliantly accomplished 20th-century English concerto well worth discovering.

The Academic Festival Overture, which plays on melodies like Gaudeamus igitur and lacks little in the way of good cheer and moments of student-like boisteressness, owes its composition to Johannes Brahms’s receipt of an honorary doctorate from the University of Breslau (today’s Wrocław). Following this 1880 composition, which Brahms jokingly referred to as his Janissary Overture, we will hear William Walton’s Violin Concerto, written almost 60 years later, in 1939. The virtuosic nature of the concerto, here being interpreted by Peter Zimmermann, is explained by the fact that it was the incomparable soloist Jascha Heifetz who commissioned Walton to write the now highly popular piece.

The entire second part of the concert will be devoted to Richard Strauss’s 1896 symphonic poem paying tribute to the utterly peculiar work of the German philosopher whose influence is still alive today to such a degree that the title page of the score states “Freely after Friedrich Nietzsche.” The 21 bars of the Introduction to Also sprach Zarathustra, which have been invoked countless times, including in 2001: A Space Odyssey, are very likely already familiar even to anyone who is just beginning their acquaintance with the wonderful world of classical music.