Sir András Schiff plays Beethoven Piano Concerto 5

After the success of the Brahms Piano Concerto series with Sir András Schiff in 2019, we are delighted to welcome back our Principal Guest Artist for a three-night series of Beethoven’s Piano Concertos.

We conclude our season with Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 5, which biographer Maynard Solomon describes as the piece of music that marks both the summit and the end of Beethoven’s “heroic decade”.

‘The Wilderness Pleases’ is inspired by one of the many influential pieces of work to come out of the Enlightenment era; Shaftesbury’s ‘The Moralists.’

In the book, the main character Theocles describes the terror of encountering a group of crocodiles in an Egyptian desert. After escaping the monsters, he is overcome with a desire to admire them as wondrous creatures of the natural world. He says,

‘let us fly to the vast deserts of these parts […] ghastly and hideous as they appear they want not their peculiar beauties. Wilderness pleases.’