2017 is the anniversary of two revolutions. In 1517 Martin Luther posted his 95 theses on the church door in Wittenberg, sparking the Reformation – and 400 years later the Bolsheviks stormed the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg. In his 12th symphony Dmitri Shostakovich painted a huge programmatic musical tableau of the October Revolution. In it he expressed the hope – eight years after Stalin's death – for a more humane Soviet Union, but once more that hope was soon dashed. What Luther means to Protestants, what Lenin and Trotsky mean to communists – that's what Wilhelm Tell means to the Swiss: a folk hero who led his country to freedom. Gioachino Rossini devoted an entire opera to him, and for a century people have been trying in vain to get the overture out of their heads. Piotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky worked on his violin concerto in D major as if in a trance while at Lake Geneva. He wanted it to express sheer joie de vivre. "In a state of mind like this", he wrote euphorically to his patron Nadezhda von Meck in 1878, "composing has absolutely nothing to do with work." This sensitive composer had not thought it possible that he would ever again feel such a zest for life: the mental abyss into which he had recently fallen was too deep. Dennis Russell Davies and star violinist David Garrett will bring this joie de vivre with them on their coming visit to Basel.

This concert is not preceded by an introductory talk.