Conductor Bruno Weil kicks off our The Wilderness Pleases season with Beethoven’s ‘Pastoral’ Symphony No 6. After hours of toil over musical scores, Beethoven would happily spend hours tramping through the countryside on restorative walks. This symphony is his spectacular tribute to nature and displays overtones of the composer’s pantheism, a belief that (to over-simplify) God resides in all of nature.

To Weil, “the symphony is forty minutes of happiness and relaxation – and three minutes of thunderstorms. You hear the birds, for example, and can even understand them. The challenge is to make the piece sound relaxed and without any pressure, yet also convey the deeper layer of meaning. That’s the secret of the symphony.”

Weil will be bringing the same level of preparation to the evening’s two other works, Mozart’s Overture to The Magic Flute Opera and Haydn’s Sinfonia Concertante. Each of these very well-known works sits squarely within Weil’s core interest: Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven are the greatest names from the so-called Classical period of music before Romanticism took hold, and Weil is among their great interpreters.

The conductor has had a long and fruitful association with the OAE. This goes back more than twenty years when he conducted Così fan tutte at the Glyndebourne Festival; he then went on to record a string of works with the OAE for Sony. The orchestra is “extremely quick in understanding and technically fantastic so it’s easy to work with them”, he says.