London Philharmonic Orchestra: The undiscovered Beethoven

The heavens themselves blaze forth the death of princes, but to the young Beethoven, Emperor Joseph II was more than just a monarch. He was liberty’s champion; the herald of a new dawn. Unperformed in the composer’s lifetime, Beethoven’s Cantata is a startlingly powerful meditation on mortality and enlightenment, and a mirror to his heaven-storming Grosse Fuge – in Stravinsky’s words, ‘an absolutely contemporary piece of music that will be contemporary forever’. This is Beethoven the radical, the visionary, the eternally young, and Vladimir Jurowski opens the evening with the jubilant King Stephen Overture.