Beethoven's Fifth Symphony
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- What you'll hear
- All about the music
Bold. Shocking. A slice of musical history.
Who’s on stage
The ball of energy that is Nil Venditti, the Principal Guest Conductor of our home band, Royal Northern Sinfonia. Plus very special guest, international pianist Boris Giltburg.
What they’re playing
Chopin’s Second Piano Concerto. Somewhat confusingly written before his First. Go figure. Anyway, a critic at the time described it as having an ‘abundance of original ideas of which the type is nowhere to be discovered’. Plus, Beethoven’s iconic Symphony No. 5.
Need to know
Price: £22.50-£50.50
Discounts: save if you’re under 17, aged 18 – 30, a classical first timer, or a group of 10 or more people. Check the details.
Running time: 2 hours, including a 20 minute interval.
Age: under 14s must be accompanied by an adult.
What you'll hear
Gabriela Ortiz Clara
Frédéric Chopin Piano Concerto No. 2
Ludwig van Beethoven Symphony No. 5
Who's playing it
Nil Venditti conductor
Boris Giltburg piano
Royal Northern Sinfonia
What's happening in the music?
It’s obvious that every piece of music had a first performance. But at the same time some pieces just seem to have been around forever, and it’s hard to imagine the excitement that must have surrounded their first-ever outing. Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony (you know it: da da da daaaa) would likely have been pretty shocking for its first audience. Music that was this radical, this unrelenting, this euphoric, just hadn’t been heard before. There’s no one like the charismatic Nil Venditti to make it seem like new either.
Off to a bad start
Given how famous it is now, you’d think that Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5 was a hit from the moment the first note was played.
However you’d be entirely wrong. The first performance in 1808 was pretty close to a disaster. The hall was freezing for a start – one concert goer later complained of wanting to leave but couldn’t do so within Beethoven’s eyeshot.
Also, Beethoven was a firm believer in ‘more is more’ and had programmed a four hour concert full of new and pretty difficult music. Plus there hadn’t been enough rehearsal (just one in fact) and Beethoven and the orchestra didn’t seem to see eye to eye “Beethoven…had found in the rehearsals and performance a lot of opposition and almost no support” and that “it had been found impossible to get a single full rehearsal for all the pieces to be performed, all [were] filled with the greatest difficulties”.
If that wasn’t enough, human error had crept into the printed programme, so the audience thought they were listening to Symphony No. 6 when they heard No. 5, and vice versa!
So the response was perhaps understandably underwhelming. It took another 18 months for the symphony to become the hit it is today.
