This concert – which features the duo of Izabella Simon and Dénes Várjon, a couple off the stage – offers unassailable masterpieces of Romantic song and chamber music, with the Schumann works that make up the first part also evoking the presence of the composer’s wife and fellow musician, Clara.

This is because Schumann’s 1840 song cycle Dichterliebe, set to poems by Heinrich Heine and here being performed by the baritone Johannes Held, is a true personal confession, and the composer, who was finally able to marry his beloved Clara that same year, may have recognised himself in the fictional hero of the series. Schumann also dedicated his 1842 Piano Quintet to his wife, but due to Clara’s unexpected illness at the time the work was to be premiered among their circle of friends, it was none other than Mendelssohn who stepped in to play it, not only handling the difficult piano part brilliantly, but also later providing Schumann with useful collegial advice.

“He is the Mozart of the 19th century,” was how Schumann praised his brilliant colleague, who composed his Octet at the age of 16 but only premiered it more than a decade later, in 1836, with instructions for the performers that “…all its parts must be played in a symphonic style; the pianos and fortes must be separated very precisely and clearly, and must be emphasised more sharply than is usually the case in pieces of this genre.”