symphony 7

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.