Sir Simon Rattle conducts Mahler, Dvorák, Webern and Hans Rott, as well as a new suite from Julian Anderson’s Exiles. Five very different musical voices – but the stories they tell are universal. No music – no human life – exists in a vacuum. The poets who inspired Julian Anderson’s Exiles wrote in order to communicate, even in isolation. Tonight, under the baton of Sir Simon Rattle, they raise the curtain on a programme of music that’s bursting to say something new: from the ferment of late-Romantic Vienna to Antonin Dvorák’s symphonic cri de coeur. Dvorák wrote his Seventh Symphony while mourning the death of a child. Impassioned, defiant and glowing with melody, it’s one of those pieces that wrestles hope from tragedy, and it’s long been a special favourite of Sir Simon’s. Meanwhile the young Mahler and his forgotten friend Hans Rott search for their own voices, and Anton Webern finds his, in the jewel-like, emotionally charged miniatures that make up his Six Pieces.