Leonard Bernstein: In 2018 the music world celebrates the 100th anniversary of this thoroughbred musician. Yutaka Sado, once Bernstein’s assistant, conducts a colourful programme in which the outbreaks of joy in all three works can be considered an act of reverence for Bernstein’s musicianship and personality. Leonard Bernstein always enjoyed playing Maurice Ravel’s jazzy, languid Piano Concerto in G Major as a soloist and conductor; later, he went in search of Haydn’s sharp wit in that composer’s symphonies. In Antonín Dvořák’s music he loved the delight in melody and rhythmic élan. But the sentimental side is not neglected – in the dreamy slow movement of Ravel's concerto, for example, with its melancholy, floating melodicism unfurled by the young blind pianist Nobuyuki Tsujii. Or in the Adagio of Haydn’s 102nd Symphony, which is believed to have been written as a farewell gift to a girlfriend acquired in London. And not least in the voluptuous sentimentality of Dvořák’s Eighth, in which light and dark, melancholy and carnival atmosphere interplay in a captivating way.