Rehearsal: Dima Slobodeniouk conducts Unsuk Chin, Bruch, and Brahms featuring Itzhak Perlman, violin

Unsuk Chin wrote her subito con forza—“suddenly, with power”—as a miniature tribute to Ludwig van Beethoven in 2020, during which year many celebrations for the composer were planned and scuttled due to the pandemic.

The first of his three violin concertos was one of his earliest successes and remains the most frequently performed of all his works.

Though Johannes Brahms already had several works for orchestra behind him when he completed his Symphony No. 1 at age 43, he knew that the genre required a newfound comfort level in writing for the orchestra, and, still more significantly, a reckoning with his anxiety of following in Beethoven’s foo...