Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony by Arnold, Malcolm, MacMillan, Beethoven, Från (2024/2024), Dirigent Kahchun Wong, The Bridgewater Hall, Manchester, Storbritannien

Composed towards the end of the Napoleonic Wars, Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony possesses a triumphant, bordering on boisterous, sense of ‘a return to life’. Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony is filled with stirring dance rhythms and magnificent dynamic colour; the score calls for the first recorded use of fff (fortississimo: louder than fortissimo, as loud as possible). It has also been featured extensively in popular culture: for example, its second movement provides the background music to King George VI’s stirring World War II speech in The King’s Speech (2010). Preceding the symphony, Kahchun Wong will conduct Arnold’s Four Scottish Dances, evocative of traditional Scottish folk tunes. Colin Currie, ‘at the summit of percussion performance today’ (Gramophone), will join the platform to play in James MacMillan’s celebrated Veni, veni Emmanuel, a percussion concerto that proved to be the composer’s breakthrough work.