The story of “Papa" Haydn’s cello concertos is a dark and complex one. Music archivists are discovering more and more cello concertos by the Meister from Rohrau - and persistently denying their authenticity. The authorship of two concertos, those in D major and C major, is beyond doubt. The typical combination, or rather mismatch, of gallantry and rusticity, of coarseness and grace, of absentmindedness and extravagance, gives away its author much more clearly than any scrupulous study of the manuscripts. The Concerto in D major employs many of the musical figures of the late baroque, set in an unusual, almost parodic context; a masterful and fantastic show of the virtuoso with the most daring and astonishingmusical postures, passagework, and clumsy cadenzas.

Beautiful Florence, the memory of which is enshrined in the eponymous opus next on the programme, is the city associated with Tchaikovsky’s last Italian sojourn - and with the incredibly quickly composed masterpiece “Pique Dame". “Souvenir de Florence” is by no means a faded postcard from an Italian adventure, nor mere crumbs fallen from the plate of the opera (on the final page of the piano score of the opera Tchaikovsky penned some sketches marked ‘sextet’). It is often written about Tchaikovsky’s European responsiveness, that he had the freedom with which to turn his impressions and experiences into music as recognisably Russian, inseparable from the wanderings of the man and his imagination. The sextet is by no means a mere ethnomusicological compendium of musical memories, but a poetic impression that the eye transforms into sounds