Music Director Designate Sir Simon Rattle conducts the work of a composer who has always been close to his heart: Haydn. To begin, the “Prelude and Liebestod” from Wagner’s ground-breaking opera, Tristan and Isolde, leads to Bartók’s notorious technically demanding Piano Concerto No. 2, all racing scales, fistfuls of notes and frantically quick tempos. Rattle himself calls the final part of the programme ‘an eccentric journey through Haydn’. ‘I thought how wonderful it would be if all the most outlandish and particularly the most forward-looking pieces of his were all put together like a kind of ‘greatest hits’,’ he says. ‘The idea is to make a musical journey through all that is quirky and extraordinary, humorous and profound in Haydn. Hopefully this pasticcio will give a picture of the composer who most summed up all the ideals of the Enlightenment, of intelligence, respect, humour, wit and profound thought.’ Program WAGNER: “Prelude and Liebestod” from Tristan und Isolde; BARTÓK Piano Concerto No 2; HAYDN An imaginary orchestral journey – featuring excerpts from Symphonies Nos 6, 45, 46, 60, 64, 90 and 101; ‘The Creation’, ‘The Seasons’, ‘The Desert Island’ and ‘The Seven Last Words of Christ on the Cross’