Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique

Here’s a rare opportunity to hear the music as Berlioz would have when the piquant winds, warm brass, and crisp strings of a celebrated period-instrument orchestra make his vibrant colors and gorgeous melodies soar even higher. Moving tales inspired by Romantic poetry and classical antiquity are set to music by a quintessentially French Romantic. Berlioz cast the viola as the protagonist in Harold in Italy, a moody and melodic work recalling Byron’s wandering hero, while two legendary queens—Dido and Cleopatra—come to life in impassioned vocal music.

West-Eastern Divan Orchestra

Words aren’t necessary when a great musical tale is told in vibrant orchestral colors and lush melodies. You’ll hear a delusional county squire battle windmills and an unnamed hero wrestle with fate in sumptuously orchestrated masterpieces. Strauss assigns the cello the role of the beguiled Don in a work that vividly portrays episodes from Cervantes’s famous Don Quixote. Tchaikovsky’s work may not tell a literal story, but fate and doubts figured prominently—almost as characters—in his diaries, and his magnificent symphony gives voice to all in a gripping journey from darkness to triumph.

Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra

While their approaches differed, Mozart and Brahms both achieved transcendence at the culmination of their symphonic careers. Mozart wrote his Symphony No. 40 in a white-hot flash of inspiration, while Brahms labored over his Symphony No. 4 for more than a year. Both symphonies are brilliantly crafted, Mozart’s buoyed by bustling energy and culminating in a finale Wagner called “exuberant with rapture and audacity,” while Brahms’s grand architecture is built on the foundation of a series of simple opening motifs that ascend to a stunning final movement inspired by a Bach theme.

Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra

Mahler’s final complete symphony is the brilliant culmination of his career. The grand scale, intense emotion, earthy dance, and startling power—the hallmarks of his symphonies—are also present, pointing to an ethereal finale that ascends to the otherworldly. Michael Tilson Thomas and the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra—both renowned Mahler interpreters—offer a vision into the eternal.