A legendary Russian artist couple are guests of Concerto Budapest for this recital, and not for the first time, since the pianist Viktoria Postnikova and her conductor husband, the 85-year-old Gennady Rozhdestvensky, performed to great acclaim with the orchestra in the previous season.

From the Cradle to the Grave, Liszt’s final symphonic poem composed in his old age, was inspired by ink drawings of the same title penned by Mihály Zichy. The work is split into three movements: The Cradle; The Struggle for Existence; The Grave: The Cradle of the Future Life. The titles of the movements reflect the programme of the symphonic poem. Schubert’s four-movement piano fantasy certainly exceeded the composer’s performance capabilities, and it is in all likelihood that this degree of difficulty brought the work to the attention of Liszt, who prepared an orchestral accompaniment and double piano arrangement out of the Wanderer – fantasy. The concert winds up with one of the most characteristic and popular works of Romantic programme music: from dreams to the witches’ Sabbath, with the obsessive repetition of the Berliozian ‘idée fixe’.