Isabelle Faust plays Bartók

Pietari Inkinen, the only Nordic conductor of recent years to take charge of a Ring Cycle at Bayreuth, opens his concert in Bergen with Wagner’s own Faust Overture - the only clue we have to what symphonic music from the composer might have sounded like and a mouth-watering presentiment of what was to come in the Ring and other works.

Before the towering edifice that is Brahms’s Symphony No. 1 - music that combines ground-shaking power with exquisite beauty - Inkinen and the orchestra are joined by Isabelle Faust for the second of Bela Bartók’s violin concertos. Written on the eve of the Second World War, Bartók’s concerto is both an escapist fantasy and a realist testament to the bitter truth of the time - a work that combines haunting lyricism and folksy energy, and wraps it all in bewitching orchestrations that couldn’t have come from anybody else.