Enjoy classical music in an intimate setting. Metro concerts feature smaller scale works from the classical repertoire and newer pieces by contemporary composers. Richmond Symphony musicians are often featured soloists.

Mozart wrote the Overture to “Don Giovanni,” K. 527, the night the opera’s final dress rehearsal had been performed. As his wife told him stories to keep him awake and entertained, the composer dozed off, eventually falling into a deep sleep. Upon waking, Mozart wrote and completed the Overture within two hours. Mozart’s biographer Ernest Newman insists that the story is true. Composition for Mozart “meant developing the work in his head; he found the business of writing it out rather tiresome, and he would often postpone it as long as he could. . . . the Overture to Don Giovanni had been worked out in his head long before . . . all he had to do on that historic night was to put the notes on paper.”

“How delighted I shall be to ramble for a while through bushes, woods, under trees, through grass and around rocks. No one can love the country as much as I do. For surely woods, trees, and rocks produce the echo which man desires to hear.” Beethoven spent his summers in the country and it was there he did his most productive work. Beethoven composed most of his Symphony No. 6, what he himself called his Pastoral symphony, in the “delicious wooded environs of Heiligenstadt.”

 

Learn more about Steven Smith, Conductor.
Learn more about Reena Esmail, Guest Composer. 

Program Notes