Greatest Hits

What’s Interesting About This Concert

• Du-du-du-duuuuhhhh. Beethoven obsessively pursues those first four notes—the entire first movement (and much of the others) is derived from them. Those first four notes have stuck in the ears of Western civilization for over 200 years! The essence of Beethoven’s genius was that he could take the simplest building blocks of the classical style and construct radically new, monumental works.

• Famous from its use in cartoons, Morning Mood is the first of four movements that make up Peer Gynt Suite No. 1 and was written to depict the sun rising in the Moroccan desert.

• Finlandia was composed in 1899 and premiered in the composer’s native Finland, reaching an international audience the following year. The central melody is sometimes sung—with words not original to Sibelius—as the hymn “Be Still, My Soul.”