The audience isn’t always right! In our fifth concert with mega-star Nikolai Lugansky, we will perform Johannes Brahms’s Piano Concerto No. 1. This monumental piece, which took the composer nearly five years to complete, had a string of unsuccessful premieres, with listeners criticizing its “worst dissonances and most unpleasant sounds.”

It doesn’t count — were Bruckner’s words when he scratched out and dismissed his Symphony in D minor when compiling a list of his works. Harsh comments from one conductor were supposedly the reason for this decision, which had far-reaching consequences. Bruckner’s Die Nullte symphony wasn’t published or performed for more than half a century. Under the leadership of Stanislav Kochanovsky, we will however prove that this piece certainly deserves attention.