Steven Osborne is joined by the orchestra and our Chief Conductor Ryan Wigglesworth for the festival’s closing concert. Steven has always been a leading champion of Tippett’s music, especially his glorious Piano Concerto whose infectious rhythms and ecstatic climaxes echo the music of his opera The Midsummer Marriage.
The music of Beethoven was one of Tippett’s lifelong inspirations, so the great ‘Eroica’ symphony makes a fitting climax to the programme. Although originally intended as a tribute to Napoleon, until Beethoven famously repudiated him when he declared himself emperor, it remains music’s most magnificent celebration of the ‘heroic’.
