It Shall Certainly Not Bend and Crush Me Completely tickets

The Fifth Symphony picks up where the Eroica (No. 3) ends, in both psychological and musical senses.

Dark-toned, potent and radical, this is Beethoven the warrior putting on the armour of C minor to, as he writes to his brothers, ‘seize fate by the throat; it shall certainly not bend and crush me completely’. Its finale is triumphantly reinforced by the appearance of trombones, piccolo and contrabassoon for the first time in a symphony.

In the Fourth Symphony, meanwhile, we meet the Beethoven who was capable of so much lightness, intoxicated perhaps with the possibility of love.

Adam Fischer has quietly developed a reputation as one of the foremost interpreters of 18th- and 19th-century symphonic repertoire. His recording of all 104 Haydn symphonies in Esterhaza with his own Austro-Hungarian Haydn Orchestra is the stuff of legends, and has only been amplified by his cycles of Mahler, Brahms and Beethoven.