Andris Nelsons conducts Beethoven, Mozart, Maskats, and Strauss with Rudolf Buchbinder, piano

The first piece ever performed by the BSO in October 1881, the Consecration of the House Overture is one of only three orchestral works Beethoven composed in his final decade.

The chamber music-like Concerto No. 23 in A is one of Mozart’s most lyrical and, in the central Adagio, poignant works. Mozart created the model of the piano concerto as we know it, writing a dozen highly varied pieces to perform for Vienna audiences of the 1780s.

Likening Tango to Maurice Ravel’s La Valse, Maskats presents the tango in vibrant orchestral colors spanning a variety of moods. The instrumentation includes the tango’s most characteristic instrument, the bandoneon.

Richard Strauss’s 1910 opera Der Rosenkavalier strongly evokes the Vienna of Mozart’s era, though the lushness and harmonic richness of music is thoroughly 20th-century. The orchestral suite mixes gloriously romantic love music with sequences of the opera’s elegant waltzes.