BBC Symphony Orchestra & Chorus 2025-26 Barbican Season Oramo conducts Brahms's Second Symphony

Great artists need great respite, and what better to refresh the musical senses than travel? In Luxor, Egypt, with the Nile in view and the sea not much further away, Saint-Saëns conjured melodies and motifs evocative of southern Spain and Northern Africa. The result was his fifth piano concerto, for which we’re joined by a virtuoso whose pizzazz is matched by only his precision – Bertrand Chamayou.

Brahms, on the other hand, stole away to a lakeside summer resort in Southern Austria which inspired the pastoral, Beethoven-esque levity of his Second Symphony. Bright doesn’t mean basic, however, and all of Brahms’s usual richness and complexity is more than present in this most spirited of his symphonies.