Our Centennial Celebration begins with Beethoven under the baton of Principal Conductor Peter Oundjian with acclaimed masterworks commemorating a century of symphonic music in Colorado. Superstar pianist Hélène Grimaud lends her prodigious talents to Brahms’ First Piano Concerto, filled with virtuosic beauty and bombast in equal measure while featuring many an homage to his idol, Beethoven.

As a musician confronting the fate of impending deafness, Beethoven persisted while documenting hopeful aspirations to prevail in his music and personal journals. Within his monumental Fifth Symphony — perhaps the most recognizable and well-known composition in the classical repertoire — he famously depicts this struggle with the ominous four-note motif signifying “fate knocking at the door.”

Today, Carlos Simon takes inspiration from a journal entry written a decade after the Fifth Symphony, which includes a passage from Homer’s Iliad, beginning, “But Fate now conquers…” Taken together, we witness as Beethoven grapples against inevitability before ultimately relinquishing himself to the hands of fate.