Berlin Philharmonic / Kirill Petrenko (2G)

Kirill Petrenko starts the evening by whisking the audience off to Great Britain. Felix Mendelssohn’s Third Symphony was inspired by a trip the composer made to Scotland: the music is dense in atmosphere, both austere and bright, with a verve reminiscent of folk dance. The Tenth Symphony by Dmitri Shostakovich – the first he wrote after the death of Stalin in 1953 – is programme music of a very different kind. Shostakovich gives palpable expression to the reprisals of the Stalin era with an oppressive, often grotesque score, before ending with a radiant finale full of hope.