photo: Angie Kremer

The concert programme will open with Adagio for Strings, one of the 20th century’s most popular classical music compositions. It would be no exaggeration to describe the piece as a smash hit, and its creator, Samuel Barber, was marked down as something of a single-work composer. Following a performance of this always poignant composition, Concerto Budapest will once again welcome one of the ensemble’s most remarkable returning guests, Gidon Kremer. The great Lithuanian musician will first play the violin solo from Franz Schubert elegantly masculine Polonaise in B-flat major, followed by Béla Bartók's Violin Concerto No. 1, a confession of love intended for the violinist Stefi Geyer. The second half of the concert will begin with the very finest slow movement of the Beethoven string quartets – the overwhelmingly beautiful cavatina from String Quartet No. 13 in B-flat major. Finally, with András Keller as conductor, we will hear Schubert’s Symphony No. 8 in B minor, which despite – or perhaps because of – its incompleteness, feels entirely appropriate here.