October

Beethoven's Symphony No. 1 is highly reminiscent of his predecessors Haydn and Mozart, who perfected the symphonic form, yet in it we already see traces of the path he would follow that would lead away from classical models into the dramatic realm of romanticism. Nevertheless, this symphony shows Beethoven in a happy mode, written at a time of his life before he encountered many of the tragedies, including deafness, which formed the foil for his later heroic style. The other works on the program could be grouped under the heading "exoticism", or even humor, such as we hear in Mozart's use of a Turkish percussion band, Debussy's impressions of a boat ride, followed by a quasi-renaissance procession and minuet, but topped off with a can-can, or Vaughn-Williams' evocation of the buzzing of wasps (i.e. lawyers, as Aristophanes makes clear in the play).