Midori plays Brahms

When she was just ten years old, Midori played for Pinchas Zukerman in a masterclass. After 30 minutes, Zukerman turned to the audience with tears running down his face and said, “Ladies and gentlemen, I don’t know about you, but I have just witnessed a miracle.” A year later she made her début with the New York Philharmonic and has been at the forefront of the world’s greatest violinists ever since.

Stravinsky’s five-finger piano exercises were designed for talented young children. The Russian master’s Symphony in three movements also has a very prominent piano part. Written for the New York Philharmonic at the end of the Second World War, it is coloured, as the composer admitted, “by this arduous time of sharp and shifting events, of despair and hope, of continual torments, of tension and, at last, of cessation and relief.”