Mendelssohn, Wieniawski, Brahms

Mendelssohn’s overture was inspired by a journey to Scotland, and to this day one can hear in it the motion of the sea and the sombre grandeur of the cliffs. By contrast, the Violin Concerto by the 19th-century Polish virtuoso Wieniawski is a dazzling and captivating masterpiece — an irresistible work of the Romantic repertoire that demands nobility, technical brilliance, and a deeply expressive, singing tone from its soloist, performed on this occasion by Lajos Sárközy.

The evening’s conductor, Kristóf Baráti, is himself a distinguished violinist, though this time he takes up only the conductor’s baton. The concert reaches its culmination with Brahms’s Symphony No. 1, which the German composer wrote as the long-awaited “successor” to Beethoven’s symphonic legacy. Nature, brilliance, and monumentality — three faces of Romanticism — reveal themselves throughout this program.