The radiant and heart-stopping Adagietto is without doubt the defining movement of Mahler’s Fifth – a love token for his beloved new wife, Alma – played by strings and harp alone. But this Symphony is about so much more than that, as the BBC National Orchestra of Wales and award-winning Principal Conductor Ryan Bancroft will testify. In somewhat over an hour of music, Mahler runs the full gamut of emotion from the trumpet fanfare that introduces a dark funeral procession, through what he calls “this primeval music, this foaming, raging sea of sound” to a whirling dance and, after the serenity of the Adagietto, a boisterous and joyful finale.

Like Mahler, Bartók wrote a musical gift for the woman he loved – his First Violin Concerto. But, unlike Mahler, Bartók’s was rejected (as was he shortly afterwards) and the work remained unpublished until long after his death. James Ehnes, “the Jascha Heifetz of our day” (The Globe and Mail, Canada) is a champion of this two-movement Concerto, and the perfect interpreter to bring out both the romance and tetchiness of Bartók’s intensely personal work.