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Chinese virtuoso Yuja Wang is the soloist in Bartók’s Second Piano Concerto – a work the composer intended to pose ‘fewer difficulties for the orchestra’ and to be ’more pleasing in its thematic material’ than his First. Beethoven’s emotionally charged ‘Eroica’ Symphony forms the second half – the groundbreaking symphony that would pave the way for the mighty Romantic works of Mahler and Bruckner. The concert opens with Charles Ives’s atmospheric Decoration Day, inspired by his father’s marching band.