Sarasota Music Festival: Beethoven and Shostakovich

Conductor Stephanie Childress returns with a captivating program featuring Armenian American composer Mary Kouyoumdjian’s Tagh (Diary) of an Immigrant, which the composer describes as “an imagined journal entry by a hope-filled someone.” Shostakovich wrote his popular Second Piano Concerto—voted ninth in the 2024 “Classic FM Hall of Fame”—for the 19th birthday of his son Maxim, who premiered the work at his conservatory graduation. Beethoven’s joyful Symphony No. 2 teeters on the precipice of several significant moments: it is the last symphony he composed in the style of Mozart, and it also marked the beginning of Beethoven’s mounting realization that his deafness was incurable.