Two Schumann concertos with a troubled fate make up the first half of this concert, as the Cello Concerto in A minor was completed in just two weeks in the autumn of 1850, but was never performed during the composer’s lifetime: neither in its original form nor in the violin concerto version that Schumann himself prepared for his friend József Joachim to play. But while this work eventually did reach the public, in 1860, the composer’s final concerto, the 1853 Violin Concerto in D minor, would only appear in the repertoire in 1937, 84 years after its completion.

In contrast to the Schumann compositions, which have long since taken their rightful places and here will be interpreted by the masterful soloists László Fenyő and Marc Bouchkov, the Mendelssohn symphony, which fills the entire second part of the concert, has been respected as a great work by connoisseurs since its inception.

Moreover, Mendelssohn, who embraced his Protestantism at a deep level, wrote his ‘Reformation’ symphony (in 1830, for the 300th anniversary of the Augsburg Confession) with this very ambition in mind, as the appearance of the so-called ‘Dresden Amen’ in the first movement and the motif from the famous Lutheran chorale A Mighty Fortress Is Our God in the final movement both attest to convincingly.