Music and Silence

Tonight Elgar’s elegiac, heartbreakingly beautiful Cello Concerto is paired with Mahler’s epic Symphony No. 1. For Mahler ‘a symphony must be like the world, it must embrace everything’, and sure enough his youthful First Symphony welcomes in a breathtaking array of influences from birdsong to a certain well-known nursery rhyme, creating a musical adventure of mind-boggling cosmic brilliance.