‘Brussels Philharmonic’

Prokofiev is in the limelight this evening. The programme includes his Second Symphony, a veritable plea on behalf of neoclassicism, breaking with Romanticism's exaltation of the subjective, and his Second Piano Concerto, a pivotal work in which we hear traces of Romanticism clash with a radically different idiom marked by the dissonances so dear to the composer. This is a difficult, although visionary work, worthy of Severin von Eckardstein, well-known to Brussels audiences since his victory in the Queen Elisabeth Competition in 2003.