Beethoven is, without doubt, the most recognisable figure in Classical music. When conjuring an image of the archetypal romantic composer with auteurist tendencies it is always Beethoven who springs to mind. His moody bust adorns the shelves of countless households across the world.

Bowie's lighting bolt makeup, which first appeared on the cover of 1973's Aladdin Sane album, is equally iconic and has become synonymous with a well-worn trope about hedonistic rock stardom and everything that goes with it. Before the saturation of culture as we know it today this image was desirable or dangerous, or perhaps both depending on your point of view.

"My arrangements of Bowie songs do not seek to replicate their recorded originals but rather aim to capture the essence of his restless creativity. For me this was a way of remaining truer to his ethos of reinvention; he was famously uninterested in retreading the same ground.

To bring these ideas together and to lend coherence to my hypothesis I'm delighted that we will be joined by journalist and author Paul Morley. Paul's biography The Age of Bowie was published in 2016 to widespread acclaim and his 2020 book A Sound Mind: How I Fell in Love With Classical Music (And Decided to Rewrite Its Entire History) combines "memoir and history in a spiralling tale that establishes classical music as the most rebellious genre of all." I can think of no better qualified person than Paul to explore the connections between two supposedly disparate artists.

In these days of cultural fluidity - when the lines between 'high' and 'low' culture are constantly being erased, in an age where all recorded music is instantly available and when history, since the advent of film, photography and sound recording, seems like it happened yesterday and not 100 years ago - it is hard to know what or how to think about art, or sometimes to even care. The upside is that we do have the opportunity to make up our own minds without resorting to tribalism and esprit de corps. In a time where pop borrows freely from classical and vice versa we can place David Bowie alongside Beethoven and just 'see what happens.'

Finally, this concert is not concerned with the intricacies of musical comparison; in my mind it would be pointless to compare or contrast the composing styles or specific musical content of these artists." - David le Page - Artistic Director

Presented by Ardour - contemporarily classical