<img src='' title='Event Category: Concerts' alt='' id='templ_icon_' width='' height='' /> Event Category: Concerts

For Beethoven, C minor was the key of high drama. It was the sound of struggle, defiance and determination – and nowhere is that more apparent than in his Piano Concerto No.3.

Written as Beethoven confronted the reality of his worsening hearing loss, the concerto marks a turning point in his career. The influence of Mozart is still there, but Beethoven’s darker and bolder voice own voice is beginning to emerge. Kristian Bezuidenhout joins London Mozart Players for this landmark work.

A generation later, Mendelssohn found inspiration not in personal turmoil but in travel. Packing his bags and donning his Birkenstocks, Mendelssohn set off on a grand tour of Italy where he documented his journey through sketches of music that would ultimately emerge as his Symphony No.4, AKA the ‘Italian’ Symphony. Filled with dance and folk references, Mendelssohn’s musical postcard transports us to Southern Europe with one of his best-loved compositions.

Do we control our fate, or does it control us?

That question lies at the heart of Beethoven’s Symphony No.5. Opening with perhaps the most famous four-note motif in classical music, the work occupied Beethoven for four years as he grappled with worsening hearing loss that would eventually leave him almost completely deaf. Dark, radical and relentlessly driven, it builds from a single idea into a journey from tension to resolution, culminating in a blazing finale that redefined what a symphony could be.

Framed by Florence Price’s heartfelt Adoration and Mendelssohn’s spirited Concerto for Violin and Piano (performed by Martin James Bartlett and Sebastian Bohren), London Mozart Players explore three composers finding expression in strikingly different ways.

Travelling across more than three centuries of music, London Mozart Players present a programme where the past is never quite left behind…

In 1906, Vaughan Williams stumbled across a melody that was already more than 300 years old. The tune, written by the Tudor composer Thomas Tallis for a 1567 psalter, was hiding in plain sight while Vaughan Williams was editing The English Hymnal. Several years later, he transformed it into the Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis, one of his most beloved works: a piece that blurs the boundaries between Renaissance England and the twentieth century.

Tallis’ influence continues to echo through David Knotts’ From Crystal Heav’ns Above, written for this concert’s soloist, Simon Blendis. Inspired by William Byrd’s elegy for his friend and mentor Thoams Tallis, the work traces a thread through centuries of English musical history, imagining Tallis’ spirit lingering long after his death.

Haydn completes this time traveller programme with his Symphony No.64, ‘Tempora mutantur’ (‘The times change, and we change with them’). As the master of musical surprise, Haydn plays around with our expectations, delaying and subverting time in ways you might not expect.