No 1 in C major: Furiant
No 2 in E minor: Dumka
No 3 in A-flat major: Polka
No 4 in F major: Sousedská
No 5 in A major: Skočná
No 6 in D major: Sousedská
No 7 in C minor: Skočná
No 8 in G minor: Furiant

Dvořák was relatively unknown at the time of his Slavonic Dances commission in 1878. The German composer Johannes Brahms had spotted that Dvořák had won several prizes and suggested his publishers contact the younger Czech. They did, requesting he write Bohemian dances in the style of Brahms’ Hungarian Dances.

Opus 46 was first published as a set of piano duets for the amateur market. Their popularity spread like wildfire, and soon Dvořák orchestrated them and composed a second set in 1886. His seat in the musical firmament was confirmed. At the time of Dvořák’s birth, Czech people had no real country of their own. The regions where they lived – Bohemia, Moravia and Silesia – were part of the Austrian Empire but it was during his lifetime that regions fought for political independence which filtered through to the arts community. Composers started wanting musical independence, too, overshadowed, as it had been, by German and Italian styles; composers began using folk tunes and dance rhythms, the beginning of musical nationalism. Dvořák’s life-long passion was the Czech national folk tradition – and while he wrote a lot of Czech-sounding compositions, in fact, he hardly ever used any actual folk melodies in his music. He was a sort of magpie, stealing elements from his native musical heritage, most notably the rhythms, but writing the melodies himself. His Slavonic Dances are no different , but that does not belie their heritage.

_{Note by Sarah Breeden}

Antonín Dvořák
^1841–1904

Today, Dvořák is celebrated as one of Europe's most forward-thinking and accomplished composers. He wrote his First Symphony at 24, subtitled 'The Bells of Zlonice' after a village he lived in as a child. This love for his home country echoes throughout his work, which often makes use of Slavic rhythms, melodies and folklore.

Moving to the US in 1892, he was appointed Director of the National Conservatory, one of the few conservatoires to accept women and students from ethnic minorities at the time. Dvořák wrote a series of newspaper articles during this time advocating African American and Native American music, and these influences can be heard in his Symphony No 9, 'From the New World'.

1. Allegro non troppo
2. Molto lento e larghetto
3. Vivace

Now regarded worldwide as one of the leading figures in 20th-century music, Michael Tippett took a long time to achieve the recognition deserved both for his music and his deeply held views on a range of public issues, notably pacifism. His Piano Concerto (1955) dates from a period in which many of his works were receiving a great deal of criticism from conductors and orchestral musicians, not to mention the press.

The Piano Concerto followed his first opera, The Midsummer Marriage (1953), which was slated as 'Midsummer Madness' and generally dismissed on account of its over-complex libretto and complex contrapuntal orchestration. To be fair, its vocal writing was thought to be exciting, especially that of the lead soprano role, Jenifer, sung originally by Joan Sutherland who, vocal talents aside, apparently had not a clue what she was singing about.

The concerto had been germinating in Tippett's mind since he attended a performance of Beethoven's Fourth Piano Concerto, played with ravishing poetry by Walter Gieseking. Using this work as his model, Tippett surprised everyone by avoiding Tchaikovskian/Rachmaninoff-style battles between the soloist and orchestra. Instead, his first two movements favoured inward reflection and an ornate style of lyricism that clearly derived from The Midsummer Marriage. The rhythmic complexities of the third movement were another surprise, derived from Tippett's fascination with jazz and boogie-woogie.

'Too many notes'

After a lot of confused negotiations as to who should play the solo part, the most favoured soloist, Julian Katchen withdrew at a few weeks' notice, and Louis Kentner stepped in to give a plausible account of the solo part with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra on 30 October 1956. Nevertheless, the work attracted adverse criticism. 'Too many notes': the gibe Mozart attracted during his lifetime was also the oft-repeated dismissal of Tippett's music.

Fortunately, a new generation of pianists and conductors took the Concerto seriously. John Ogdon and conductor Normal Del Mar put the work back on the map. Others followed, notably Paul Crossley, who recorded it with the LSO with Tippett conducting, and Emanuel Ax, whose first performance of it was with the Los Angeles Symphony Orchestra under André Previn.

The work is now in the repertoire of numerous younger generation pianists and its performance tonight is by one of the composer's most ardent champions, Peter Donohoe.

Listening Guide

Click below to keep reading about Tippett's Piano Concerto (opens in a new tab).

_{Note by Meirion Bowen}

Sir Michael Tippett
^1905–98

Michael Tippett was born in 1905 into a precariously wealthy family that was politically aware (his mother was imprisoned as a suffragette) but relatively unmusical. As a child, and maybe as an adult too, he was something of the perennial outsider, at odds with, even ahead of, the beliefs and taboos of the times.

Tippett's 60-year career was slow-burning and, as for all innovators, has been greeted with consternation and with jubilance alike. He was eventually acclaimed as a composer of international stature and importance.

_{Profile by Oliver Soden}

1. Allegro con brio
2. Andante con moto
3. Allegro
4. Allegro

Time and familiarity, those old enemies of innovation, have conspired to mellow the impact of Beethoven’s Fifth on the modern ear. It has often been in danger of acquiring, from frequent repetition, a cosiness that can dull its surprises.

Those who took their seats in Vienna’s Theater an der Wien for the Symphony's premiere in 1808 would have had some idea what to expect. Anyone who had already heard his Third Symphony, the ‘Eroica’, or indeed the ‘Pastoral’ Symphony (premiered earlier in the same concert as the Fifth), would have known that Beethoven had greatly expanded the timescale of the symphonic form, raised its level of seriousness and expressive weight, and brought to it an increasingly theatrical, even narrative strain. But few can have been prepared for the Fifth's brusque assault on their senses.

Beethoven was a revolutionary, but he was one who worked within an established tradition, and who was subject to his fair share of influences. Several of these come together in the Fifth Symphony. One was Mozart, with whom he shared a special feeling for the expressive power of C minor (both men composed some of their most emotional and personal works in that key); another was the large-scale, open-heartedly bombastic music composed for the public celebrations of Revolutionary France; and a third was Haydn, his teacher, who time and time again had shown in his string quartets and symphonies how to construct whole movements from small thematic cells.

Listening Guide

Click below to keep reading about Beethoven's Symphony No 5 (opens in a new tab).

Whether one experiences the Fifth Symphony as a journey from darkness to light, a depiction of adversity overcome, or as an emergence from some sort of underworld, there is no doubt that it has an effect on the listener that goes beyond the appreciation of its musical and formal niceties. Beethoven himself has left little clue as to what the symphony is ‘about’, save for a possibly apocryphal remark to his friend Schindler about the first movement: ‘thus Fate knocks at the door’.

_{Note by Lindsay Kemp}

Read: Beethoven 250 timeline

Find out about the life and work of Beethoven, discover key moments in the world that he knew, and see how his legacy continues long after his death.