Vasily Petrenko conducts Beethoven 5

The evening

‘Thus fate knocks at the door’: even if you’ve never heard a Beethoven symphony, you’ll know the shattering four notes that open his Fifth. But if that’s all you know, you’re in for the ride of your life, as Vasily Petrenko conducts the symphony that redefined classical music – a white-knuckle ride from despair to triumph, told in music so powerful that it left Beethoven’s contemporaries gasping for breath. Follow that? You can’t, so we’re beginning with a symphonic scene from Nadezhda Rimskaya-Korsakova, her last piece of composition before her marriage to Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, and a showstopper from the 20th century, the daredevil piano concerto that the young Prokofiev wrote in an age of revolution to demonstrate his own off-the-scale skills. And who better to play it than a good friend of the RPO – the ‘pristine, lyrical and intelligent’ (The New York Times) Jan Lisiecki?