Beethoven

Artistic and Music Director Alexander Shelley leads the Naples Philharmonic in a program built around two contrasting symphonies, beginning with what is arguably Beethoven’s most famous work, the Fifth Symphony. Driven by its iconic four-note motive and sweeping journey from darkness to light, the revolutionary score stands among the most influential works in symphonic history. The stormy intensity of the Fifth subsides in the program’s second half with Symphony No. 6, “Pastorale,” a five-movement depiction of the natural world enjoyed in a serene countryside stroll, briefly interrupted by a passing thunderstorm — revealing Beethoven at the peak of his imaginative powers.

In the culminating program of the Naples Philharmonic’s concentrated Beethoven Festival, Artistic and Music Director Alexander Shelley leads the orchestra, the Naples Philharmonic Chorus and a quartet of vocalists in what many consider one of the most supreme achievements in music history. The program begins with Jake Runestad’s A Silence Haunts Me, a touching choral work dramatizing Beethoven’s struggle with deafness, setting the stage for his final symphony — a monumental masterpiece that shattered the traditional symphonic form as the first to feature soloists and chorus.

Artistic and Music Director Alexander Shelley leads the Naples Philharmonic in a program that unleashes Beethoven at his most kinetically charged and sharply focused. The program opens with the Seventh Symphony, a work driven by such relentless rhythmic momentum that Richard Wagner famously called it the “apotheosis of dance.” From its opening pages to its propulsive finale, the 1812 symphony embraces optimistic folk-like rhythms until its exhilarating finale. The program concludes with the lighter Eighth Symphony, Beethoven’s shortest and most compact symphonic statement. Bright, witty and tightly constructed, it offers a concentrated counterweight to the expansive drive of the Seventh — a work Beethoven himself mischievously claimed to prefer.