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Their vacation schedule brings them together in spring, summer, fall and winter — in that order, in the story — a plan that conveniently allows for Vivaldi’s well-known violin concerti to fill up the soundtrack.

The world's only professional one-handed concert pianist, Nicholas McCarthy, makes his Proms debut, playing a concerto originally written for Paul Wittgenstein, after he lost his right arm during World War One.

Schnittke praised the work as "perhaps the most important violin concerto of the 20th Century".

He thought of the program he had planned back in December: the Taras Bulba Overture by Mykola Lysenko, a concerto by Edvard Grieg and César Franck’s Symphony in D Minor.

There it was, big and bold, from the first firm notes of Brahms’ concerto to the searing, earth-shattering sunrise grandeur of the finale of “Gurrelieder.”