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At the first performance of his Violin Concerto in 1806, Beethoven suffered the indignity of hearing his sublime masterpiece interspersed with demonstration of stunt fiddle pieces! The work was never to gain acceptance in his lifetime, but has since been hailed as the greatest of the German violin concerti. The work finds an outstanding exponent here in the hands of the legendary Pinchas Zukerman. Tchaikovsky’s magnificent Fourth Symphony dates from 1878, roughly contemporary with his disastrous attempt at marriage, and he later described the music as "a true echo of what I was going through at that time". The Symphony is dominated to an extent by the ‘Fate’ motif that opens the first movement, but at the end of all the soul-searching comes the jubilant finalé, indicating (in the composer’s words) that "to live is still possible!"