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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.

Back a hundred or so years ago, before the radio, the phonograph and other such devices, a parlor piano was a source of amusement for some. If two players were available, duets were often played. We’ll look at some of these keyboard duets this week.

Igor Stravinsky’s first two ballets for Diaghilev's Ballets Russes, The Firebird and Petrushka, were enthusiastically received by the Parisian audience, but nothing prepared them for The Rite of Spring.

We began the cycle of all the Beethoven piano sonatas on Mozart’s Attic in June of last year with Number 1 in F minor, Opus 2, written in 1795 when Beethoven was a brash young pianist new to the big city of Vienna.

This Sunday we look back at some of the conductors of the first half of the last century:Toscanini, Koussevitzky, Beecham, Walter, Stock, Stokowski, and others.Fearsome personalities, some of them, and legendary figures on the podium, they brought classical music to the masses via the recording studio and later the airwaves.

Czech composer Antonin Dvorak is best known for his Symphony from the New World, written during his tenure as director of the new National Conservatory in New York. He was a composer of some distinction with a considerable portfolio to his credit before he was tapped for the conservatory job.

We’ll check in with the Traveling Mozarts as we continue with the cycle of Wolfgang’s symphonies. He’s eleven years old now, and set to premiere his newest symphony with himself and his sister playing in a tavern in the present-day Czech Republic. How did that happen?

We’ve been following the progress of young Master Mozart — now going on twelve years old — as he embarks upon the rather busy year of 1768, in which he composes a three-act comic opera at the request of the Emperor: not bad at any age.

Antonio Vivaldi set the Gloria of the Latin Mass to music in an ambitious, and for him unusual, choral work. Twenty years after that, Francis Poulenc took the same idea and wrote a choral Gloria of his own. We’ll hear both this Sunday.

We start in Russia this Sunday and end up in 20th-century America with lots of stops in-between, and of course we check in on our series of Mozart symphonies with Number 14 this week.