Maxim Vengerov, Barbican Centre

The longer, original version of Sibelius’s Violin Concerto is played extremely rarely, and indeed, only a few violinists in the world have the permission of the composer’s descendants to perform it.
Among that handful is Maxim Vengerov, whose phenomenal technique and virtuosity wins the approval of Sibelius’s grandson and his consent to play the piece in public. Vengerov's special relationship with the Oxford Philharmonic Orchestra as artist in residence therefore deepens with a concert featuring the D-minor concerto in this very unusual 1904 version. The revision in 1905 is the much more familiar piece. Lovers of the concerto will recognise much but not all of the material in this earlier version, and will hear surprising orchestral tempi.
The concerto is performed with Tchaikovsky’s powerful Symphony 6 in B minor, Op 74, the Pathétique. Many read into the moving symphony intimations of the composer’s own mortality: he died nine days after its first performance in Saint Petersburg in October 1893.
The Oxford Philharmonic, now in its 18th year in its present form, was born out of the Oxford Philomusica. Its founder and director, Marios Papadopoulos conducts the Sibelius, but Vengerov himself conducts the Tchaikovsky.