Kahchun Wong, the Hallé’s Principal Conductor Designate, takes to the podium to showcase glimpses of the extraordinary things that he and the Hallé can already do.

He is joined by the virtuosic violinist Liza Ferschtman, who performs Brahms’s masterfully-constructed Violin Concerto. Composed in the idyllic scenery of Wörthersee, where Brahms penned melodies so abundantly he had to take care not to tread on them, this lyrical work ends with a spirited Hungarian-style finale.

Much of Shostakovich’s extraordinary output was profoundly marked by politics and the judgements of censors. His monumental Fifth Symphony, one of the greatest and most powerful of twentieth-century orchestral works was, supposedly, ‘A Soviet artist’s response to just criticism’. It is now known that this popular symphony was composed as a work of defiance so subtle that no-one realised at the time.

The concert opens with Falla’s stunningly original Ritual Fire Dance, perhaps the most often transcribed section of his remarkably beautiful and powerful ballet, El amor brujo.