Summer term 2022: 19 April 2023 – 24 May 2023 (6 weeks)
Members: £72. Non-members: £90
Concessions: £10 (call the office 020 8340 3343)
Summer 2023
A quartet of symphonies
This is an unusual course. It will take four symphonies spread over a period of just over 100 years and see how each of them had a great influence on the development of music and how, together they helped shape music history from the 19th to the 20th centuries. The works we will investigate are Symphony No 3 (Beethoven), Symphonie Fantastique (Berlioz), Symphony No 6 (Tchaikovsky), and Symphony No 5 (Shostakovich) – all seminal works of their time. By means of lecture, discussion and recorded examples we will look at each of these in detail, put them in their historical context, and try to discover why they are of such importance and why they all remain so popular in our concert halls.