This work was commissioned by the London Philharmonic Orchestra as a companion piece to Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9. As Martin Anderson explains, “Magnus Lindberg’s Two Episodes attempt – perhaps for the first time in the history of music – to mirror a procedure one occasionally finds in architecture: it is the equivalent of adding a modern portico to some old and revered building.”

Lindberg has a particular fondness for Beethoven: “If I was really pressed to choose just one composer from the ...