Francesca Dego, Bbc Symphony Orchestra & Dalia Stasevka

The celebrated violinist Francesca Dego is joined by the BBC Symphony Orchestra and her regular collaborator Dalia Stasevska for this recording of the violin concertos by Brahms and Busoni. A cornerstone of the repertoire, Brahms’s Concerto dates from 1878, a year after the Second Symphony, and was composed for (and dedicated to) the virtuoso Joseph Joachim. The Concerto takes the standard three-movement form, and as in Beethoven’s Concerto (considered by many as Brahms’s inspiration for the work) the first movement is significant in its length and its complexity. Busoni’s Violin Concerto in its turn is inspired by both Brahms and Beethoven, and like both previous works it is in the key of D major. Premièred in Berlin in 1897 by the Dutch violinist Henri Petri, the Concerto is dazzlingly virtuosic.

Conductor Dalia Stasevka who received the BBC Music Magazine’s ‘Personality of the Year’ Award in 2023 and the Lahti Symphony Orchestra present three works by the Finnish composer Helvi Leiviskä, who was Finland’s first major female composer. Initially inspired by the language of late Romanticism – she mentioned Brahms as her favourite composer – Leiviskä developed an original, modern style that eschewed all schools, convinced that it was more important to tread one’s own path than to follow fashionable styles. While her output may seem small in terms of quantity, it more than makes up for it in the quality of the works, especially her symphonies, a genre she considered ‘the highest manifestation of music’.