In 1729, though already busy as cantor of Leipzig's Thomasschule, Bach agreed to direct a local collegium musicum, made up of university students and professionals that performed every Friday evening in a coffeehouse (and occasionally elsewhere). To maintain a steady supply of new music for the ensemble, he often arranged existing works, sometimes ones he had composed years earlier. Around the later 1730s, he wrote fourteen concertos for one, two, three, or four harpsichords with strings for his collegium concerts - history's first great body of keyboard concertos.

The Concerto for Two Harpsichords in C Minor, BWV 1060, was long assumed to be an arrangement of a concerto for two violins, but in the early-twentieth century, the German musicologist Max Seiffert demonstrated, on musical grounds, that the original was probably for violin and oboe. He noticed, for instance, that the Harpsichord II part was largely melodic and wholly devoid of string-like figuration, and concluded that it had originally been written for a high woodwind instrument with enough projecting power to compete with a solo violin. In the early 1700s, that could only have meant an oboe. Hearing is believing: with the original solo parts for violin and oboe restored, the instrumentation of BWV 1060 seems more appropriate to its musical ideas than it does in the two-harpsichord version. Since the 1920s, there have been various published reconstructions of the original BWV 1060, and the work is now popular in this form.

As is typical of Baroque concertos on the Italian model, BWV 1060 has three movements (fast-slow-fast). The outer movements are in ritornello form (i.e., with alternating orchestral and solo episodes), though they unfold organically. In both, there is much subtle interplay between solo and orchestral forces, and Bach develops the ideas he introduces in the opening bars throughout, always in counterpoint and in endlessly imaginative ways. In the Adagio, the strings accompany pizzicato except in a brief but striking passage near the end and in the final bar, which leads without a break into the stormy finale.

Programme note by Kevin Bazzana

Mozart at nineteen already possessed a spectacularly assured compositional technique. Of the later violin concertos, Maynard Solomon wrote that "the beauties succeed each other with a breathtaking rapidity; their outpouring of episodic interpolations suggesting that we need not linger over any single moment of beauty, for beauty is abundant."

In the first movement of the Violin Concerto No. 4, there are half a dozen distinct melodies in the orchestral introduction alone, and as many more after the entrance of the violin soloist. So fertile is Mozart's imagination that it threatens to burst the bounds of conventional concerto form, yet he never loses control of his material; the sequence of musical events is as perfectly judged as it is flexible.

The slow movement, is (in the words of the Mozart scholar Neal Zaslaw) an "unabashed melodic outpouring", and once the solo violin enters it is fully in command of that outpouring. In the remarkable, experimental finales of the last three violin concertos, Mozart plays fast and loose with conventional rondo forms by introducing the most unexpected contrasting episodes, as though he were too brimming with ideas to be confined.

In the finale of this Concerto, the basic rondo is itself unusual, being based on two contrasting ideas: a lovely Andante grazioso and a jig-like Allegro ma non troppo. Still, this is not enough variety to satisfy Mozart. At about the half-way point, he introduces another charming new episode, this time a contredanse - a French dance popular throughout Europe in the eighteenth century. He leaves behind the urbanity of the rondo and introduces a hint of popular style: the drone bass and double-stopping in the solo-violin part conjure up folk instruments such as the bagpipe, hurdy-gurdy, and musette. When the contredanse is over, the two contrasting rondo themes each make two final appearances.

Yet, after Mozart is finished showing off his technique, imagination, and wit, the finale ends quietly, with a smile and a shrug, as though it had all been just a game.

In a review of the Fifth Symphony published in 1810, E. T. A. Hoffmann wrote that Beethoven "unlocks the marvelous realm of the infinite," "awakens that endless longing that is the essence of Romanticism," and "surrenders himself to the inexpressible." By contemporary standards, the Fifth was a pathetic work, full of passion, and a sublime work, unrestrained by conventional notions of beauty, order, and good taste. This is no half-hour's pleasant entertainment, but an elevated, edifying, sometimes disturbing, ultimately uplifting musical drama-a quintessential expression of Beethoven's world- view.

In all four movements Beethoven plays fast and loose with Classical conventions, yet his forms are as logical and organic as they are unpredictable. Note, for instance, his near-obsessive developing of the famous four-note motif with which the piece begins ("Thus Fate knocks at the door!" he supposedly remarked of that motif); the result is a dense, driven first movement in which tension accumulates steadily and finally explodes in furious convulsions. The four movements form a unified cycle, with much of the work's dramatic weight thrown onto the brassy, celebratory finale, which resolves and transcends the musical argument of the previous movements. (Militaristic episodes in the marchlike slow movement seem to look ahead to the finale.) Beethoven links the finale directly to the third movement (a scherzo in all but name) with a tense, dramatically charged transition, and later inserts a ghostly recollection of the scherzo in the middle of the finale, casting a momentary shadow over the prevailing mood of triumph.

The massive, often clangorous scoring of the Fifth was much indebted to the "public" music of the French Revolution and to the operas of Gluck. The woodwinds and brass often evoke band music, especially in the finale, where Beethoven employs several instruments associated with the military: piccolo, contrabassoon, trombone. It is perhaps no coincidence that by the time the symphony was completed, in the spring of 1808, Austria was at war with Napoleon's France (though admittedly Beethoven began sketching it as early as 1804).

The Fifth had its première as part of a long all-Beethoven program, conducted by the composer, on December 22, 1808.