2005: Poetry and belief

Not all revolutions are noisy. Beethoven’s Fourth Piano Concerto begins with the piano all alone and playing softly – the kind of enigma that the American philosopher-pianist Jeremy Denk simply loves to explore. And in this latest instalment of 2020 Vision, conductor Osmo Vänskä follows it up with nearly as many questions as answers.

From 1905 there’s a self-proclaimedly ‘heroic’ symphony with a remarkably poetic soul and, from 2005, Krzysztof Penderecki’s hauntingly beautiful tribute to another great Pole in an age of oppression and doubt: music that – as Beethoven once put it – comes from the heart and goes straight to the heart.