Beethoven’s Fourth Symphony has gotten somewhat short shrift, sandwiched between the massive Eroica (Symphony No. 3) and the heaven-storming Fifth (some of which had already been composed when he took up the Fourth in 1806). Yet, despite its relative neglect in performance, it has had many eminent admirers. Schumann called it “a slender Greek maiden between two Norse giants,” and indeed it has warm beauties and a sense of lively play well beyond the ken of its perhaps too-serious neighbors. Beethoven biographer Alexander Thayer counted the “placid and serene” Fourth as “the most perfect in form” of all Beethoven’s symphonies. Berlioz likened the slow movement to “the song of the Archangel Michael”; like other particularly lovely Beethoven movements, this one has also been connected (by George Grove) to one of Beethoven’s failed love affairs. Of course, none of these pronouncements does full justice to the work, which can be at times quite raucous, ripe with the kind of outbursts we associate especially with the younger Beethoven. The mysterious opening, which sets up the first such outburst, has been much imitated (most obviously by Mahler in his First Symphony). And the perpetual-motion effects of the finale are particularly effective as a foil for a series of dissonant crunches that rival Haydn in their raucous good humor.

John Adams’s Eros Piano is, in his own words, “a quiet, dreamy soliloquy for piano, played against a soft, lush fabric of orchestral screens and clusters. It was a direct response on my part to a piece by Toru Takemitsu, riverrun, that I had heard in a performance by the English pianist Paul Crossley. I met Takemitsu once when he visited my home in Berkeley with his wife. … Among the things we discovered we had in common was a love for the jazz piano style of Bill Evans. I wrote Eros Piano as a tribute to Takemitsu, to Bill Evans, and also to Paul Crossley, whose exquisitely balanced sense of color and attack in music by Debussy, Ravel, Messiaen and Takemitsu reminded me so strongly of that of Bill Evans.” Adams himself conducted the premiere of Eros Piano in 1989, with Paul Crossley as soloist.

Richard Strauss’s Death and Transfiguration followed quickly on the heels of Don Juan, his first big success as a composer, and was the third in his celebrated series of “tone poems” composed between 1888 and 1899. Strauss’s invention of the tone poem came as the direct result of his acquaintance with Alexander Ritter in the mid-1880s. Most importantly, Ritter completed Strauss’s conversion to Wagner’s “Music of the Future” and introduced him to the symphonic poems of Liszt, to which his own tone poems were a direct response. Indeed, it was firstly about Liszt that Strauss devised his own musical credo, that “new ideas must seek new forms.” The subject and some musical details of Death and Transfiguration rather pointedly evoke Isolde’s “transfiguration” at the conclusion of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, and Strauss claimed that the work would demonstrate to Wagner’s widow, Cosima, that he had heeded her criticism of Don Juan for its too-explicit expression of its subject, which was itself not sufficiently “eternal” in its aspiration. On Strauss’s behest, Ritter provided a detailed poetic program for Death and Transfiguration, which confirms the irregular breathing and faltering heartbeat that we hear at the beginning of the piece and later, and proceeds from there to describe a series of musical episodes in which a dying artist struggles with impending death, recalls his childhood, idealistic youth, and adulthood with inevitable regret, hears death’s fateful knocking at the door, and in the end achieves the promised transfiguration. Strauss completed the piece in 1889, conducting its premiere in 1890, but then did not return to the form until the mid-1990s, with Till Eulenspiegel.