Beethoven, the wild-haired German composer, is ubiquitous during the fall symphony season. It makes sense, as his booming, blustery compositions have a lot in common with the darkening, windy autumn season.
In the next few months, you can hear Beethoven’s Symphonies No. 3, 5 and 9, his violin concerto, his only ballet score and much more throughout Connecticut.
Here are just some of the sweet symphonies to come.
Hartford Symphony Orchestra is marking violinist Leonid Sigal’s 20th anniversary with the orchestra by having him play Beethoven’s Violin Concerto at the second Hartford Symphony Orchestra Masterworks concert of the season, Oct. 18-20. The concerto shares the program with contemporary composer Carlos Simon’s “Fate Now Conquers,” a meditation on power and ambition that Simon said he partly drew from the harmonic structure of the second movement of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 7.
The Masterworks season opens Sept. 27-29 with a double dose of Prokofiev, with the Hartford Symphony Orchestra playing the composer’s fifth symphony as well as his ever-popular children’s fable “Peter and the Wolf,” where an assortment of animals are portrayed by musical instruments.
After Sigal plays Beethoven in October, the other Masterworks concerts this fall are Nov. 15-17 with Elgar’s Concerto for Cello in E minor (featuring cellist Inbal Segev) and Brahms’ Symphony No. 1 in C minor and Dec. 13-15 with guest conductor and pianist Clayton Stephenson, the 2024-25 Joyce C. Willis Artist in Residence, and a program of Margaret Bonds’ “The Montgomery Variations” and two Tchaikovsky compositions.
An Oct. 26 Hartford Symphony Orchestra Pops concert will feature spooky works by Bach, Grieg and Andrew Lloyd Webber, as well as movie themes from “The Nightmare Before Christmas” and “Batman.” Another big holiday show, “Holiday Cirque Sugar Plum Fantasy,” featuring circus aerialists, happens Dec. 21.
Courtesy of Hartford Symphony Orchestra
Hartford Symphony Orchestra’s 2024-25 Masterworks series begins Sept. 27-29 with two Prokofiev classics. (Courtesy of Hartford Symphony Orchestra)
The New Haven Symphony Orchestra has a new music director, Perry So, who’s conducting Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 on Sept. 22 at Yale’s Woolsey Hall. Also on the program is “Gathering Song,” with music by Courtney Bryan and a libretto by Tazewell Thompson, who is known in Connecticut as a theater director and the former artistic director of Westport Country Playhouse.
The orchestra’s “Clara and Johannes” concert on Oct. 17 explores both the music and the personal friendship of composers Clara Schumann and Johannes Brahms.
There’s more Beethoven on Nov. 24, a performance of his sole ballet “Creatures of Prometheus” featuring dancers from the Tia Russell Dance Studio and New Haven Poet Laureate Sharmont Little.
The multi-media-enhanced classical duo The Piano Guys, visiting UConn’s Jorgensen Center for the Performing Arts on Sept. 21, has been known to drop some Beethoven into its sets, particularly a mash-up of themes from his Symphony No. 5 and the OneRepublic song “Secrets.”
The Hartford Chorale is performing a choral version of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5 on Oct. 20 at the Morgan School in Clinton, then on Oct. 27 at Choate Rosemary Hall in Wallingford, accompanied by the Wallingford Symphony Orchestra. Vaughan Williams’ “Serenade to Music” is also on the bill.
The Ridgefield Symphony Orchestra offers Beethoven’s “Eroica” symphony as part of its season-opening “Delights & Dances” concert Sept. 29 at the Ridgefield Playhouse. Also on the program are works by Zoltán Kodály and Michael Abels.
Beethoven is also part of Orchestra Lumos’ creative exploration of the myth of Orpheus in the Underworld, “Orpheus Sings!” Oct. 5 and 6 at the Stamford Palace. The special guest artist is Broadway star Andre de Shields, who starred as Hades in the Broadway hit “Hadestown,” based on the Orpheus myth.
While the New Haven Symphony Orchestra has found its new music director, the Greater Bridgeport Symphony is spending much of this season auditioning the main candidates for the same position at their organization.
On Oct. 5, the guest conductor is Joshua Gersen and the concert consists of Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 4, Mozart’s Symphony No. 40 in G minor and the season’s second local appearance of Carlos Simon’s “Fate Now Conquers.” Leslie Dunner leads the orchestra through works by Haydn and Gershwin on Nov. 9 and Rachel Waddell leads a “Story-Telling Time” concert with the orchestra’s own rendition of “Peter and the Wolf” plus Rimsky-Korsakov’s Sheherazade, a musical take on “‘Twas the Night Before Christmas” and “Chofki” by Native American composer Jerod Tate on Dec. 14.
The Eastern Connecticut Symphony Orchestra foregoes Beethoven this fall, though it’s doing his Symphony No. 8 in January. The orchestra, which performs at the Garde Arts Center in New London, opens its season on Oct. 26 with Saint-Saëns’ Symphony No. 3 (featuring organist Simon Holt) and Strauss’ Der Rosenkavalier Suite, then has a Nov. 23 concert of Mahler’s Symphony No. 3 featuring mezzo-soprano Jana Baty.
Also overlooking Beethoven this fall is the Connecticut Symphony Orchestra, a.k.a. the Connecticut Valley Symphony Orchestra, which has a “Night of Latin Dances” planned for Oct. 27 at Congregation Beth Israel in West Hartford, performing works by Pablo de Sarasate, Jose Pablo Moncayo and Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov.
The Norwalk Symphony Orchestra offers a concert called “The Romantics” which bypasses Beethoven (though he’s sometimes placed in that category) in favor of Verdi, Mendelssohn and Brahms, on Oct. 26 at Norwalk City Hall.
The Waterbury Symphony Orchestra also jumps on the “storytelling” bandwagon with its own “Tales of 1001 Nights” event on Oct. 6 at Connecticut State Community College in Waterbury. Like the Bridgeport Symphony, this means Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade, but the Waterbury evening also features Paul Frucht’s reworking of a Charles Ives classic as “Amazing Grace and the Unanswered Question” and Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 2 in C Minor, Op. 18 with Andrew Armstrong at the piano. The Waterbury Symphony’s next MasterWorks show is a choral spectacular with Bach’s Magnificat and Handel’s Messiah, featuring Hartford Chorale and the Connecticut State College Choir.
For fans of modern British composers, one of the most exciting events of the fall classical season in Connecticut is a 12-hour adaptation of Robert Ashley’s TV opera “Perfect Lives” organized by Wesleyan University graduate music student Emma Mistele and screening for free from 11 a.m. to 11 p.m. on Nov. 9 at the university’s Ring Family Performing Arts Hall in Middletown.
So it may not all be about Beethoven, but he’s the one to beat as the orchestras tune up for the fall.
