Led by Trinity Laban Programme Leader and Researcher Dr Christina Guillaumier, the Beethoven Summit was a unique conference that immersed performers, scholars, and music lovers in the composer’s groundbreaking sonic world.
The International Centre for Contemporary Music (ICCM) presented the Beethoven Summit 2026: the inaugural event in a series exploring trailblazers who redefined the parameters of musical expression. An innovative blend of interactive panels, talks from world-leading scholars, and performance on period instruments, the summit was a vibrant, multi-dimensional celebration of Beethoven’s legacy. It explored how evolving scholarship inspired fresh approaches to the composer’s music and continued to influence its interpretation, taking place at Admiral House in the Old Royal Naval College. The summit culminated in a concert of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 and Schumann’s Piano Concerto at Cadogan Hall on the final day.
Director of the ICCM Dr Christina Guillaumier said: “The level of intellectual energy and openness in the room was genuinely inspiring. I was especially struck by the willingness to question assumptions and to approach Beethoven not as something fixed, but as something still open to exploration. As someone who brought a few (perhaps inconvenient) questions along the way, I was very grateful for the generosity with which those were received. Many of the issues we discussed felt very much like questions of our time. The conversations around programming, audiences, and how adventurous we feel we can be extend well beyond Beethoven scholarship. They suggest that we may have more agency than we sometimes assume in shaping how this repertoire is encountered.
“There is clearly much more to be done (as there always is, but this somehow surprises me with Beethoven), particularly in relation to lesser-known, incomplete, or more marginal materials. This raises important questions about selection and responsibility: what we choose to bring forward, and how we frame it. What’s out of our archives, what is still in there, why and who is making those choices.”
