Nothing pushes composers to greatness like a crisis of nationhood. In 1924, Bela Bartók was supposed to write a piece celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the establishment of Budapest, but could only look around at a region riven with divisions. His solution was a great act of musical fusion and cultural union, a Dance Suite that used his own ‘invented peasant music’ to unify Hungary and its neighbours in a single melody that was nobody’s and, therefore, everybody’s.

In 1902, Jean Sibelius unveiled his great symphony of uprising – a work that grows from pastoral three-note noodling to an overwhelmingly passionate climax that just about every Finn at the time heard as a rallying cry against Russian occupation.

In between these two works, violinist Christian Tetzlaff comes to the Grieg Hall to play the violin concerto written for him by in 2025 Ondrej Adámek – music ‘built on the contrast between raw energy and the voice of remorse, conscience, or fate,’ in the words of the composer. Forces that cannot be reconciled wrestle ‘on thin ice’ in a concerto tailored to Tetzlaff’s uncompromising, audacious violin playing.