The magical stillness that opens Mahler’s First Symphony could be the dawn of the world itself. His First Symphony is full of pointers to meanings beyond the notes. It progressed from “the awakening of nature at early dawn”, through youthful happiness and love, to the sardonic gloom of the funeral march, and then to the finale, subtitled “From Inferno to Paradise”. The opening can still surprise even today: one note, an A, is spread through almost the entire range of the string section, topped with ghostly violin harmonics. Other unusual colours follow: distant trumpet fanfares, high clarinet cuckoo-calls, a plaintive cor anglais, the bell-like bass notes of the harp. The sheer sound-wizardry is more typical of the 20th century than even the very late 19th.

Rachmaninov took a scrap of a tune by Paganini and spun it into pure gold. Dazzling, playful, and deliriously romantic, the Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini is a matchless showpiece for a truly great pianist. For this work he chose to combine concerto form with variation form to produce a single-movement work, roughly following the fast-slow-fast outline of a conventional concerto but actually comprising an introduction and 24 variations on a theme. The number 24 was significant, for Rachmaninov used as the basis of the work, the 24th Caprice for solo violin by Paganini published in 1829.