Scottish conductor Rory Macdonald leads this afternoon’s live broadcast for Â鶹ԼÅÄ Radio 3 with music from England, Germany and Finland.
The programme opens with Delius’s neglected and rarely performed tone-poem, Eventyr, translating as ‘Once Upon a Time’. Inspired by a collection of Norwegian folk tales published in 1841, this is much more than onomatopoetic fairy-tale music - conjuring the atmosphere of witching forests, mythical beasts and dark musical domains.
Acclaimed young pianist Pavel Kolesnikov is in the spotlight for Beethoven’s Fourth Piano Concerto - a piece for which the composer himself was the soloist in its first public performance in December 1808.
Closing this afternoon is Sibelius’s suite of light, incidental pieces for a play about King Christian II, the 16th century Danish monarch.