London Philharmonic Orchestra: 2008 - Landscape and memory

1908: Charles Ives’s trumpet asks an eternal question. 1808: Beethoven offers the only answer that’s ever really been needed: a symphony inspired by the countryside, whose storms, bird-calls and hymns conceal eternal truths behind some of the most serene music he ever wrote. And in between, Thomas Adès takes on the Book of Genesis, in a piano concerto – first performed at Royal Festival Hall in 2008 – that’s simultaneously a meditation on the infinite, and an endlessly stimulating entertainment. A piece, wrote The Guardian, ‘to inspire big thoughts about creation – of the world, or of music, or both’.