Unlike many great symphonies, Elgar’s first achieved fame nearly instantly—it was performed over 80 times in Europe and North America in its first year. Its popularity has endured, with over 10 recordings released in the first decade of the 21st century. It’s easy to see why. As the Evening Standard wrote in 1908: “The composer has written a work of rare beauty, sensibility, and humanity, a work understandable by all.”

Violinist Leila Josefowicz is a passionate advocate of contemporary music, with several living composers having written concertos for her. In this concert she plays Stravinsky’s Violin Concerto, a rhythmic, pulsing piece with Baroque overtones. Stravinsky basically invented his own format for this concerto, and the two “arias” in the middle offer some gorgeous violin-playing, including a rare (for Stravinsky) bit of reflective melancholy in Aria II. The program opens with Lili Boulanger’s Of a Spring Morning, a vibrant and delicate piece, and closes with Tchaikovsky’s Capriccio Italien, inspired by catchy tunes the composer heard on the streets Rome.

For their chamber music concert this year, the Festival’s resident string quartet takes on Brahms’s earnest, yet lovely, String Quartet No. 2. The piece is full of canons, or imitative melodies (a nod to Bach), and Hungarian themes (perhaps a nod to violinist Joseph Joachim, who played the premiere). Following, the Quartet will play Haydn’s Quartet Op. 76 No. 2, another formally serious but lively and gracious work, also with nods to Bach (note the canon in the 3rd movement) and Hungarian flourishes in the finale.