Lauryna Sableviciute returns to open our Beethoven 200 year with a repeat performance of the concerto she gave with the orchestra in November 2025. After that performance, one reviewer wrote that ...

‘the contribution by the soloist Lauryna Sableviciute... was glittering. She embodied the music brought a quite personal touch to an outstanding performance of a familiar piece’.

The Emperor is Beethoven’s grandest piano concerto, taking the listener on a dramatic musical journey from the powerful to the most sublime.

Beethoven exploited the recently expanded range of the piano, not least in the grand flourishes of the opening, one of the first occasions a soloist had been heard at the very opening of a concerto. The orchestra plays a much more significant role than in the previous concertos, especially the horns – and even the timpani gets a solo!

Fireworks of a different kind in our final piece! Four years after completing the Emperor concerto, Beethoven embarked on what was to be his most eccentric work, and one that is rarely heard in the concert hall. Wellington’s Victory portrays the victory of Wellington’s troops over Joseph Bonaparte (older brother of Napoleon) at the battle of Vittoria in Spain in 1813 and doesn’t hold back! The piece is scored for a very large orchestra and is in two parts, with the first part depicting the approach of the armies and battle scenes. Listeners will easily spot Rule Britannia representing the British forces and (rather more curiously) Marlborough has left for war for the French; the tune is known to us today as For he’s a jolly good fellow. The more obvious choice, La Marseillaise, was banned in Vienna at the time. The second half is much less pictorial, though we do hear God save the King and subsequent variations of it.  

In between the two Beethoven works, the second half opens with Richard Strauss’ Serenade in Eb, for winds. It's a single movement work, and with its use of 13 instruments references Mozart’s great Serenade for the same number of players. Written in 1881 whilst Strauss was still at school, this is no mere juvenalia – it is a piece that shows that the young Strauss certainly had a good knowledge of writing for the instruments and offers a glimpse of the lyrical style that was to become an outstanding feature of his subsequent work. 

The Representation of chaos from Haydn’s Creation is one of the most remarkable pieces of instrumental music from the very end of the C18th, and as we celebrate Beethoven this piece reminds us of the legacy that he was to build upon. Haydn uses the biblical image of a time when the world was ‘without form, and void’. This is a music of seemingly disconnected phrases, aching fragments of melody and unexpected harmonic shifts – maybe unwittingly, Haydn was paving the way for the C19th. 

Stephen Pratt

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