Tchaikovsky Fifth Symphony

Sunlight, shadows and unbridled passion: Alina Ibragimova plays Mozart and Nathalie Stutzmann conducts Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony.

‘With desire and passion,’ wrote Tchaikovsky on the slow movement of his Fifth Symphony, and for all its glorious melodies and soul-stirring drama, he rarely wrote anything more intimate – or more honest. It’s a striking contrast to the graceful Fifth Violin Concerto by the composer Tchaikovsky revered as ‘the Christ of music’: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.

Still, masterpieces like these contain multitudes, and no artist knows that better than Alina Ibragimova, a violinist whose Mozart (according to BBC Music Magazine) is ‘in a class apart’. Expect her to make the most of the young Mozart‘s often irreverent humour. And conductor Nathalie Stutzmann will bring a singer’s sense of theatre to the light and shade of Ravel’s bittersweet Le Tombeau de Couperin, as well as Tchaikovsky’s semi-autobiographical symphony. ‘We need more conductors like her,’ says Sir Simon Rattle: you’re about to hear why.