Michael Church, The Independent Wed, 2013-05-08 01:00

The second half of the concert began with actor Matthew Sharp spot-lit at a desk and reading [..] Beethoven’s anguished Heiligenstadt Testament, while the orchestra played sotto voce the Adagio from his Opus 132 string quartet. And the meld was effective. [..] The contrast between the 30-year-old’s despair and the ecstatic calm of the ‘Heiliger Dankgesang’ he went on to compose at the end of his life was moving in the extreme.