At the age of 26, award-winning German conductor Aurel Dawidiuk has already made quite a name for himself in his profession – for the past two years, he has been the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra Amsterdam’s principal guest conductor.

Now, he is conducting the KHO for first time and opens the programme with Brahms’ playful Haydn-Variations. That Joseph Haydn‘s famous virtuoso C major concerto, a core piece of the cello repertoire, was only found in Prague in 1961 - after it had been thought to be lost since Haydn's lifetime - is hard to imagine today. Our soloist is the young Russia-born cellist Anastasia Kobekina, who has been living in Germany since 2012.

The concerto will be followed by Robert Schumann's Second Symphony, which he composed in the winter of 1845/46 while suffering from depression. He found peace in composing, which became for him a “resistance of the spirit, through which I sought to combat my condition.” His friend Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy conducted the premiere at the Leipzig Gewandhaus.