The symphonies of Haydn and Mozart represent the desire for perfection and balance within the entertaining musical form called "symphony", originally created by Giovanni Battista Sammartini and other enlightenment composers, all of whom wrote music to please the aristocracy.

Everything changed with Beethoven... show details+ hide details-

Our festival's three featured symphonies, Brahms First, Beethoven Fifth, and Tchaikovsky Sixth, all represent personal expressions of struggle. Each of these symphonies are complete stories. In this festival we wish to also give our audiences new experiences of these beloved works. Therefore we are programming each symphony with shorter works that offer rich historical contexts and comparisons.

Our Brahms program pairs Brahms with Bartok and explores the connections these composers share in their respective symphonic ambition and the inspiration they draw from Eastern folk music. Our Tchaikovsky program presents the profound relationships between large-scale works and song. This program includes samples of the Russian folk song which seek to illuminate the close relationship of the Russian lieder to Tchaikovsky's lyrical compositional style. Finally, our Beethoven program constitutes a journey back through time in which the audience can trace the impressionist composer Claude Debussy's unlikely relationship to Beethoven through the stylistic "bridge" of Richard Wagner.

- Michel Galante Conductor and Artistic Director of the Symphonies of Struggle Festival