Incorporated in the generous arch of the String Quintet in G Major, one of Brahms’s most cosmopolitan and optimistic compositions, are the strains of Viennese waltzes, Slavic melancholy and virtuoso Hungarian gypsy music. This concert dives deeper into those worlds in a programme featuring works by Dvořák, Strauss, Shostakovich and Brahms himself. Brahms’s lifelong friend, the violinist Joseph Joachim, complained that, in order for it to be heard, the opening of the quintet needs three cellists. Joachim’s wish is fulfilled in Johannes Marmén’s arrangement for string orchestra, when our three very own O/Modernt cellists take to the stage. The orchestral arrangement is particularly fitting for this piece, which grew from Brahms’s sketches for an unwritten fifth symphony.

How many people know that there was a moment in the Middle Ages when England – not famed for its musical innovation! – made an epoch-changing contribution to western music? Medieval English composers fondly cultivated the interval of the third (the hop from doh to mi in the sol-fa system) – a vogue that culminated in a style known as the Contenance angloise (the ‘English manner’). With the rising thirds of Brahms’s Clarinet Trio in A Minor as its centrepiece, the first of two concerts devoted to musical thirds also features heavenward journeys by Bach and the endless ascent into the infinite enountered in Arvo Pärt’s breathtaking Spiegel im Spiegel.

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The warmth and generosity so often associated with Brahms’s music are due in no small measure to the composer’s love of musical thirds. Delighting in their sweetness, Brahms often extended them into chains of thirds, as can be heard in the falling garlands that grace the works in this concert. Following two celebrated chamber pieces (the Seven Fantasies and the Clarinet Sonata in F Minor), the performance is crowned with Brahms’s magnificent Fourth Symphony – the most fitting conclusion to this year’s celebration of a composer whose musical textures are as fresh and inspirational today as they were when he first revealed them to the world.