Britten Sinfonia: Elder conducts Mahler & Brahms

Brahms as Brahms wished it to be heard: Sir Mark Elder conducts Brahms’s radiant and bucolic 2nd symphony, in the second year of an acclaimed four-year symphony cycle. The cycle borrows from the spirit of early performances of the works by performing them with the musical forces that Brahms intended, to ‘exhilarating’ effect (The Times). The concert also traces a poetic line from Brahms’s symphonic Romanticism to more intimate evocations of poetry, love and nature in Mahler’s emotionally charged Songs for a Wayfarer, and Britten’s Suite on English Folk Tunes, the composer’s last completed orchestral work.