Although they were contemporaries, acknowledging each other’s talent with due courtesy and total comprehension, neither felt a particularly close connection to each other’s work - and in large measure this fact is what makes this programme, consisting of works by Richard Strauss and Sergei Rachmaninoff, especially exciting.

This programme conducted by the outstanding Russian-born Austrian maestro Alexei Kornineko can safely be described as ‘representative’, since its first part features both Strauss’s late Horn Concerto No. 2 (1942), which highlights the composer’s literally familial relationship with the instrument (his father had been a prominent orchestral horn player in Munich) and his 1886 Burleske, a work that reveals his virtuosity and sense of humor, with two exceptionally talented soloists, Bálint Tóth and Dina Ivanovna, respectively, in the lead roles.

Taking up the entire second part after the intermission will be 1940’s Symphonic Dances. Rachmaninoff’s last major work not only attests to both the homesickness the Russian master felt living as an emigré in America and the influence he has exerted on film music around the world to this day, but also, with one or two of its motifs, remarkably evokes several earlier works from his oeuvre.