‘Music is a revelation superior to all wisdom and philosophy,’ wrote Beethoven. This revelation and the idea of discovery are at the heart of this festive concert programme that opens the new La Monna...

Beethoven radically changed music, more than any other composer in history. In performing all nine of his symphonies, Alain Altinoglu has a superb opportunity to illustrate this. Schumann (through his...

‘I am not really pleased with the works I have written so far: from now on I want to take a new direction.’ The fateful year of 1802, when Beethoven became aware of his worsening deafness, brought abo...

‘It’s huge, it’s absolutely mad! You’d be scared the house might fall down!’ exclaimed Goethe in 1830, when Mendelssohn played him Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. La Monnaie’s Beethoven cycle would be inc...

‘Beethoven’s music moves the levers of trembling, fear and dread and arouses that infinite yearning that is the essence of Romanticism.’ That was the author and composer ETA Hoffmann’s opinion of Beet...