Festival Orchestra musicians, cellist Amos Yang and pianist Peter Henderson perform Beethoven sonatas at an informal mid-morning concert at The Community Library as part of the Festival’s Beethoven @ 250 celebration.

In his second symphony, Beethoven begins opening up the tightly bound symphonic form he inherited from Haydn and Mozart. He begins with a languid, 33-measure introduction, creates lyrical and funny passages, inserts the first scherzo ever to appear in a symphony, and writes two of the longest codas yet heard in the first and fourth movements. It’s a light-hearted and easy-going work. Beethoven’s two violin romances open the program, charming pieces that helped establish his bona fides as an orchestral composer.

Noted Beethoven scholar Jan Swafford presents a short talk followed by a Beethoven cello sonata performance with Festival Orchestra musicians, cellist Amos Yang and pianist Peter Henderson at an informal mid-morning concert at The Community Library as part of the Festival’s Beethoven @ 250 celebration.

Festival Orchestra pianist Peter Henderson performs Beethoven sonatas at an informal mid-morning concert at The Community Library as part of the Festival’s Beethoven @ 250 celebration.

This program opens with one of Beethoven’s first published works, his spirited piano trio in G major. A sign of the 24-year old composer’s ambition, it’s one of the first trios ever written with four movements. After that, the mood darkens as Weiss tackles Beethoven’s turbulent and tragic Appassionata. Legend has it Beethoven conceived the raging finale while howling into the wind on a rainy walk through the countryside, returning quickly to his studio to compose the most powerful music written for solo piano up until that point.

Noted Beethoven scholar Jan Swafford presents a talk about the monumental Eroica Symphony at an informal mid-morning lecture at The Community Library as part of the Festival’s Beethoven @ 250 celebration.

Beethoven’s “Heroic” symphony rewrote the rules for the genre. It was more massive, ambitious, and innovative than any music that came before. In many ways, it represents the turning point from classical to romantic music. It’s more emotional—more heroism, despair, mourning, and triumph than audiences had ever heard—with the emotions driving the music through Beethoven’s innovative use of rhythm as an equal partner to melody. Reflecting on Eroica, Leonard Bernstein marveled at “the mysterious genius of a man who is capable of uniting all contradictions into one single, perfect entity.”

Hailed by The Times as “the most astounding pianist of our age,” Daniil Trifinov was Music America’s 2019 Artist of the Year, spent the 2018-19 season as Artist-in-Residence with the Berlin Philharmonic, and joins the New York Philharmonic in that role this season. Breaking from his crazy schedule, he’ll debut in Sun Valley, performing one of the most-loved concertos ever written, Brahms’s Piano Concerto No. 1. Brahms started this “burst of pure, utter, natural genius” when he was 20 and completed it at the ripe old age of 25.