Two major scores by Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninoff follow the French premiere of Icarus by Russian-American composer Lera Auerbach.

Composed from the last two movements of the Russian-American poetess and composer’s Symphony No.1, ‘Chimera’, Icarus is filled with frenzied and harrowing sound effects, evoking the dream and death of Daedalus’s son. Rachmaninoff’s virtuoso Rhapsody, in essence, a disguised piano concerto, takes Paganini’s twenty-fourth Caprice through a series of brilliant metamorphoses, also quoting the famous motif of Dies Irae. An intense orchestral meditation on fate, Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No.5 features four orchestral movements united by a common theme, the sombre ‘choral-march’ whose anxious grip seeps even into the brighter passages. It is hard to say whether the consolation comes from the elegiac lyricism of the Andante or the power of the Finale, which seeks to affirm an improbable salvation in faith.