Double-Bill Beethoven with The Hallé

The Hallé, under the baton of the brilliant young Finnish conductor Klaus Mäkelä, opens the season in scintillating style. Beethoven was instinctively drawn to the Prometheus myth and the music he wrote for a ballet based on it, including its overture, is suitably heroic and uplifting.

Vikingur Ólafsson was recently described by Gramophone as a “breathtakingly brilliant pianist” and was a dual winner at the 2019 BBC Music Magazine awards. Tonight he is soloist in Beethoven’s First Concerto, a piece influenced by the music of Haydn and Mozart that is also stamped with its composer’s own forceful personality.

Debate still rages as to whether Shostakovich’s legendary Fifth Symphony is genuinely ‘a Soviet artist’s reply to just criticism’, as the composer once described it, or a work that encodes subversive political messages. Either way, it is a towering monument of 20th century music.

Pre-concert talk with BBC Broadcaster Trisha Cooper starts at 6pm.