Few composers unite intellect and emotion like Brahms, but the composer seems to surpass even himself in his Piano Concerto No 2, a work whose marriage of classical perfection with romantic emotion remains unsurpassed.

Leif Ove Andsnes returned to Brahms’s concerto some years ago after a long gap, reminding himself of the concerto’s ‘glorious and happy music’. Any performance of Brahms’s piece demands an almost telepathic interplay between pianist and orchestra, and there is no orchestra Andsnes knows better than the Bergen Philharmonic, with whom he first performed some four decades ago.

Anna Berg’s ritual fantasy on the significance and wonder of water was first heard at Grieg Hall in 2026 and subsequently nominated for a Harpa Award. Rasmus Hella Mikkelsen conducts this spellbinding work again here, before Sibelius’s supreme musical vision of the transcendent qualities of nature. The composer’s Symphony No 5 uses the musical image of a flock of swans on soaring trumpets to create one of the most compelling culminations in symphonic history.