The solo spot features the young violinist Eleanor Fagg who has emerged with musical tour de force after her graduation in 2005 with First Class Honours at the Royal College of Music.

While studying at the college Ellie was appointed leader of the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain in 2001. Her engagements have included playing with many of the major symphony and chamber orchestras in the London area and recitals throughout the UK, one recently involving a solo performance at the Manchester Bridgewater Hall.

In the Todmorden Concert, Ellie will play Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky's thrilling Violin Concerto in D Major, one of the best known in the repertoire and said by many to be the among the most technically difficult of the violin works.

After writing the concerto at a resort on the shores of Lake Geneva in 1878 Tchaikovsky dedicated the piece to the violinist Leopold Auer who refused to play it on the grounds that it was too difficult. One critic of the day who was not an instant admirer also commented that the violin was not played but "beaten black and blue."

The reaction of both was rightly consigned to the dustbin of history, as Ellie will undoubtedly display on her welcome visit to Todmorden.

While music in the concert is by Russian composers, their sources were international as with the Capriccio Italien. Tchaikovsky found inspiration while watching a carnival during a visit to Rome in 1880. The introduction to the stirring trumpet opening was a bugle call he overheard from his hotel window played by an Italian Cavalry Regiment.

Aram Khachaturian wrote his haunting Adagio for Spartacus and Phrygia in the Ballet composed in 1954, inspired by the heroic slave uprising against the Romans. The Adagio depicts the two lovers after their escape from the pursuing Roman Army which later trapped and killed Spartacus. This was also the theme music to popular TV series, The Onedin Line.

In The Steppes of Central Asia, a symphonic poem by Alexander Borodin first performed in 1880, we have a musical scenario of a caravan of Central Asians crossing the Caucasian Desert protected by an escort of Russian Cavalry. The music contains three themes, Russian, Travel, with the sounds of the plodding camels and the horses hooves, and an Eastern theme.

The fiery fast-moving music that we might associate with Russian Vodka, Cossacks and sabre dancing is provided by Modest Mussorgsky's Night On The Bare Mountain. He wrote it to depict a theme of a "Witches Sabbath", but the piece was never performed in his lifetime. It was later completed and orchestrated by Rimsky-Korsakov.