A feast for fans of the Classical Era, this program maps the style’s course from the late Eighteenth Century to the early Twentieth. Idomeneo represents a watershed moment in Mozart’s opera canon, a genre that would become one of the most defining in his brilliant career. Beethoven’s Eighth may be the most stylistically Classical of his nine symphonies, reminding us that one can listen to the past while saying something of the present. In his Classical Symphony, Prokofiev imagines the sounds Haydn may have created had he been alive in 1917. 

Over his 104 symphonies, Franz Joseph Haydn single-handedly codified the genre’s conventions. By the time he wrote his 92nd, “The Oxford,” he was breaking his own “rules” in order to create explosions of humor and surprise. Igor Stravinsky’s Symphony in C exudes the tremendous upheaval he experienced during its composition: losing much of his family, recovering himself from tuberculosis, and emigrating from France to the United States at the onset of World War II.