NOSPR / Alsop / Radulović / Beethovenian Enlightenment - NOSPR

It would be hard to imagine a more appropriate opening to a concert taking place just one week before the bicentenary of Beethoven’s death than Leonore No 3 (1806). The most powerful of the overtures to Fidelio, it captures the central idea of both the opera and the composer’s life: ‘following the inner voice’ – as the heroine sings in one of the arias – a voice that leads from darkness into light. This topos runs through many of Beethoven’s works and, as it happens, also through... this evening’s programme. At the heart of our journey stands the Violin Concerto in D major (1806), one of the earliest symphonic concertos in which the solo instrument becomes, as it were, part of the orchestra, whilst the orchestra itself takes on a role nearly as important as that of the soloist. Monumental in scale, dramatic in expression, and endowed with an unprecedented expressive power, the work nevertheless remains among Beethoven’s most lyrical and delicately coloured compositions. The final stage of our journey towards enlightenment is the Symphony No 7 in A major (1812), perhaps the most abstract (and certainly one of the most exhilarating!) of Beethoven’s symphonies. Here we find ‘absolute’ music, which tells a story about itself and its own power. It does so, above all, through an extraordinarily vivid and varied rhythmic texture. Each movement is constructed entirely around a distinct rhythmic pattern. No wonder that the Seventh has been described as ‘the apotheosis of the dance’, ‘the orgy of rhythm’, and a ‘dithyrambic procession of Dionysus’. It is this symphony, moreover, that persuades the enlightened Zarathustra to descend from the mountains and ‘devote himself to the earth and its pleasures’.

Piotr Matwiejczuk (Polskie Radio)

Concert duration (intermission included): approximately 110 minutes

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