As revealed in yesterday's Post, tonight's concert at Symphony Hall marks the end of Giordano Bellincampi's three years as chief conductor of the Copenhagen Philharmonic.
It won't be an entirely tearful farewell since this versatile orchetra, as well as being resident in Tivoli Gardens in the summer also plays for the Danish National Opera, where Bellincampi has just been appointed artistic director.
There will be festivities in Birmingham tonight for the orchestra and its guests to mark this change in relationship.
Before that, the concert features a generous helping of Danish music, climaxing with Nielsen's powerful and spectacular Symphony no. 4 (The Inextinguishable).
It begins with one of Denmark's best-loved nationalistic works but a rarity in England, the four-movement Gurre Suite by Christian Frederik Emil Horneman (a contemporary of, among others, Grieg in Norway to the north and Dvorak in Czechoslovakia to the southeast).
Horneman's music was composed as preludes to the acts of a long-forgotten play based on the traditional Danish folktale The Ballad of King Valdemar and Tove.
Symphony Hall audiences will already have heard Simon Rattle and the CBSO performing a much vaster treatment of the tragic story in Schoenberg's Gurrelieder.
Not quite a Danish open sandwich, the filling between these two items is Tchaikovsky's Violin Concerto, with the young Latvian Baiba Skride as soloist, playing on the 1725 Stradivarius " Wilhelmj" violin ( 7.30pm, details on 0121 780 3333).
Another overseas orchestra currently on tour in this country is the Russian State Symphony Orchestra, which tomorrow night visits the Arts Centre at the University of Warwick, in Coventry. Mark Gorenstein conducts two of the 20th century's greatest orchestral pieces, both of them adding their lustre to the film world.
The main offering is the Fifth Symphony of Gustav Mahler, beginning with an epic Funeral March and ending with an unbuttoned celebration. One of the intervening movements is the famous Adagietto for strings and harp, so movingly used as a sound backcloth on Visconti's film Death in Venice with Dirk Bogarde.
Preceding this is Rachmaninov's glittering, often diabolical Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini (Nikolai Demidenko the distinguished piano soloist), with its much-loved 18th Variation - music which played such a spooky time-travelling role in Somewhere in Time, starring Christopher Reeve, Jane Seymour and Christopher Plummer (8pm, details on 024 7652 4524).
The Rhapsody can also be enjoyed back at Symphony Hall on Saturday, when Birmingham Conservatoire graduate Jonathan French is soloist with the CBSO in a purely instrumental interlude within the City of Birmingham Choir's latest concert.
Another is Arvo Part's haunting Cantus to the memory of Benjamin Britten, with Rachmaninov's Edgar Allen Poeinspired choral symphony The Bells the main meat of the programme. Poulenc's sharplyetched Gloria opens the evening.
Judith Howarth, Andrew Carwood and Stephen Gadd are the vocal soloists, and Adrian Lucas conducts (7.30pm, 0121 780 3333).
