Is the opening melody of Bruckner’s Seventh the most beautiful beginning in all music? It’s a tune that seems to unfurl itself upwards into heaven – and Bruckner said that it came to him in a dream, played by an angel. But it’s just the start of an emotional odyssey that scales triumphant peaks and plumbs the darkest valleys of sorrow, and for our guest conductor Robin Ticciati, every performance is an act of devotion. It’s a majestic contrast to the midnight sun of Sibelius’s Violin Concerto. When our soloist Christian Tetzlaff played it in London in 2016, one critic called it ‘a non-stop tour-de-force’.