Opening the concert is Symphony No. 3 in F major Op. 90, written in the summer of 1883 almost six years after the completion of his last symphonic work: the first performance took place in December of that year in Vienna, conducted by Hans Richter, and the triumph was such that it astonished Brahms himself, who had always looked with distrust on immediate success and acclaim from the public as much as this time he drew from it a, albeit intimate, great and conscious satisfaction.

The concert closes with Symphony No. 1 in C minor, Op. 68, whose debut took place in 1876 but whose first notes by Brahms on it date back to more than two decades earlier, namely 1855: the gestation of the German composer's first symphonic effort was very long and elaborate; the first half of it was not completed until 1862 while the actual form of the work was finished in the summers of the two-year period 1874-1876, which Brahms spent in almost total isolation on the Baltic Sea island of Rügen, in a setting entirely congenial to him to devote himself to composition.

Johannes Brahms
Symphony No. 3 in F major Op. 90
Symphony No. 1 in C minor Op. 68