It Shall Certainly Not Bend and Crush Me Completely

Adam Fischer conducts Beethoven’s defiant Fifth. Its finale is triumphantly reinforced by the appearance of trombones, piccolo and contrabassoon for the first time in a symphony. It is paired with the lively Fourth, once described by Berlioz as having a “celestial sweetness”.

The Fifth Symphony picks up where the Eroica (No. 3) ends, in both psychological and musical senses. Dark-toned, potent and radical, this is Beethoven the warrior putting on the armour of C minor to, as he writes to his brothers, “seize fate by the throat; it shall certainly not bend and crush me completely”. The indefatigable opening motif provides a crucible for an unprecedented unity of invention throughout. The Fifth was not finished until 1808 and by 1806 he had brought out what became the Fourth Symphony. Here we meet the Beethoven who was capable of so much lightness, intoxicated perhaps with the possibility of love.

"I will seize fate by the throat; it shall certainly not bend and crush me completely"

- Beethoven in a letter to his brothers

Adam Fischer has quietly developed a reputation as one of the foremost interpreters of 18th and 19th Century symphonic repertoire. If his recording of all 104 Haydn symphonies in Esterhaza with his own Austro-Hungarian Haydn Orchestra is the stuff of legends, that has only been amplified by his cycles of Mahler, Brahms and Beethoven. BBC Radio 3’s Kate Molleson described his Beethoven set “as live and alert as any Beethoven symphonies I have heard”.

A Principal Artist of the OAE, our performance with Adam of Bruckner’s Fifth Symphony in 2024 was acclaimed by The Times as a performance that “absolutely stood up to the Berlin Philharmonic and Kirill Petrenko’s outstanding rendition at the Proms… culminating in a symphonic sunburst that might just carry me through the grey months into spring”.