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Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was born in 1756 on January 27th, and we will observe the occasion this Sunday with lots of music from this most remarkable of child prodigies, musicians, and composers in all of music, who — in a short life — produced a body of work that has delighted listeners for nearly 265 years now.

In the years before World War I, Paris impressario Sergei Diaghilev commissioned three ballets from Igor Stravinsky. We’ll look at the Paris ballets over the next three weeks on Mozart’s Attic, and we’ll begin with The Firebird this Sunday with the others to follow.

In 1955, the 22-year old Canadian pianist Glenn Gould arrived at the Studios of Columbia Records to record the — not much better known — Goldberg Variations of J.S. Bach. Sixty-six years later, the recording is still in print. It launched Gould’s career, and in 1981, he book ended that career with another recording of the same work. It was to be his last recording.

It’s Russian music, but Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture pairs so well with fireworks that we Americans like to borrow it for our Fourth of July festivities. Before you head out to watch the skyrockets, hear the Czar’s cannons on Mozart’s Attic this Sunday. There’s plenty of time before it gets dark.

Norwegian composer Edvard Grieg sought to bring the music of his homeland into the central European mainstream that dominated so much of the 19th-century musical scene. He wasn’t entirely successful, but a few of his works quickly became concert stage favorites. We’ll hear one of them, the A minor Piano Concerto, on this week’s program.

It’s easy for us to look back to the days of Bach and Handel and close that period off as the end of the Baroque era, and then to focus on the mature Mozart and Haydn — and then Beethoven — as the start of something wholly new. This week we’ll look at some of the music that bridged the ages of these giants: works from the Mannheim School, the Galants, and the other pre-classicists.

Henryk Gorecki’s Symphony No. 3 was one of those out-of-left-field million-seller CDs when a recording with Dawn Uphaw, David Zinman,and the London Sinfonietta was released in 1992. The work was scorned by several critics, but it obviously fell on many a receptive ear too. You can decide for yourself on this Sunday’s program.

William Shakespeare has fired the imaginations of many composers -- so many that we can only scratch the surface of musical works inspired by the Bard of Avon in a single program. But scratch it we shall this Sunday with a multi-national look at scenes from Shakespeare in music, as interpreted by six different composers. Hearken thee at six o’clock.

There wasn’t a lot of Christmas programming on television in 1952…..There wasn’t much programming, period. It was anyone’s guess as to where this new entertainment medium was headed. NBC commissioned a one-hour opera from Gian Carlo Menotti, and Amahl and the Night Visitors aired on Christmas eve. This tale of a visit by the Three Kings became an instant holiday classic, and we’ll have a performance of it this Sunday.

The music of Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky endured some criticism from both the critics and his fellow composers who felt that he needed to be more in step with where Russian music was going in the 19th century. What was that all about? We’ll see if the Fourth Symphony has any clues for us this Sunday night.