Brighton Philharmonic Orchestra

Brighton Dome Concert Hall, Church Street,

Sunday, February 8

Starts 2.45pm, tickets from £11. Call 01273 709709.

Optimism and youthful exuberance are the hall marks of Schubert’s Fifth Symphony, the final work in the Brighton Philharmonic Orchestra’s Sunday afternoon concert. Thomas Carroll, who enjoys a distinguished career as a cellist while gaining an increasing reputation as a conductor, will wield the baton with all the panache and verve we have come to expect from this amazingly gifted young artist.

Having toured the UK conducting an all Mozart programme in nine major concert halls, he is the ideal partner for Anthony Hewitt in Mozart’s valedictory Piano Concerto No. 27 in B Flat.

Completed in 1791, the final year of his life, this is Mozart’s farewell to the form that established his reputation in Vienna ten years earlier. The years before its first performance had been full of disappointment and rejection but in this work there is a mood of resignation, introspection and nostalgia, with references from earlier works.

Eminent musicologist Alfred Einstein, who was known to have something pertinent to say about everything Mozart wrote, said: “It was not in the Requiem that he said his last word ... but in this work, which belongs to a species in which he also said his greatest.”

The concert opens with one of Haydn’s most popular symphonies, No 83 in G minor (The Hen). Written in 1785, it became the first of his six Paris Symphonies which, with their unique blend of elegance and grace, power and strength, set new standards in symphonic art.

Peter Back