2003: Fantasy and revolution

Two explosive chords open the ‘Eroica’ Symphony: and just like that, Ludwig van Beethoven unleashed two turbulent centuries of musical innovation, exploration and revolution. The ‘Eroica’ still delivers a formidable shock today, and Jörg Widmann’s huge, haunting and startlingly emotional Lied for Orchestra, written exactly 200 years later, is just one way of dealing with the aftermath. And for another, join conductor Dima Slobodeniouk and mezzo-soprano Jamie Barton in the year 1903, as they board Maurice Ravel’s ship of dreams, Shéhérazade, and drift away to a place ‘where fantasy sleeps like an empress’. Escapism has never sounded more seductive.