Symphoniker Hamburg / Alessio Allegrini

Music as an affair of the heart: newly married, Richard Wagner composed »Siegfried Idyll« as a birthday present for his Cosima. The work was named after the couple’s son and was first performed in the family’s stairwell. An equally idyllic sound landscape features in Haydn’s Horn Concerto, in which the conductor Alessio Allegrini performs as a virtuosic soloist. Lastly, Beethoven’s Fourth Symphony is a feast of wonderful melodies. No surprise, perhaps, considering that he was madly in love at the time. One of his contemporaries noted: »When he was writing this symphony, his heart must have been close to bursting with joy.«