Leonard Slatkin Conducts Beethoven 250

Leonard Slatkin Conducts Beethoven 250

Friday, 31 January 2020, 7.30pm

RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra
Leonard Slatkin conductor
Stefan Jackiw violin

Beethoven The Consecration of the House Overture / 12’
Beethoven Violin Concerto / 42’
Beethoven Symphony No. 7 / 36’

In the 250th anniversary year of his birth, we salute one of classical music’s giants: Ludwig van Beethoven and who better to do it with than internationally acclaimed conductor Leonard Slatkin, than a powerhouse presence on the podium and returning for his second appearance this season with the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra.

A force of nature, an innovator, a radical, a revolutionary, a genius, Beethoven fought crippling depression and deafness to compose some of the greatest, most moving, exhilarating, stimulating and memorable music ever written.

Composed to mark the re-opening of a Viennese theatre in 1822, The Consecration of the House is a stately, noble and grand overture in the ornately bristling style of Handel that carries itself with a swaggering lightness in a mellifluous mash-up of past and present.

Dismissed as unplayable at its premiere in 1806, Beethoven’s only Violin Concerto is now an immovable cornerstone of the repertoire. Marked by seething, surging contrasts between tempestuous storm and serene calm, it boasts some of the violin’s most challenging music. To perform it with violinist Stefan Jackiw, ‘brimming with technical ability and youthful passion’ (Cleveland Plain Dealer), and Maestro Slatkin will be a great pleasure.

Beethoven thought his Seventh Symphony of 1812 ‘one of my best works’. A work of heroic stature driven along by irresistible rhythmic certainty, it begins in sunlit optimism and ends in prodigious fury and fervour as if in defiance of Beethoven’s growing deafness, an unrequited love and the ravages of the Napoleonic wars then raging through Europe. Bold, muscular and bracing, there’s no other symphony quite like it.

Preceded at 6.30pm by Soundings free pre-concert talk with Leonard Slatkin and Stefan Jackiw in conversation.

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Published by The Journal of Music on 27 January 2020

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