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Ludwig van Beethoven’s birthday is probably December 16. We’ll celebrate it this Sunday with an all-Beethoven program to mark the occasion with some of the best-known notes in all of music…… And maybe a couple of oddities as well.

As a pianist and as a composer, Clara Wieck Schumann hobnobbed with some heady company: her husband Robert, of course, johannes Brahms, Joseph Joachim, Antonin Dvorak, and others. She was the peer of many, and the better of more than a few. Sunday we’ll hear her rarely performed Piano Concerto in A minor, her only orchestral work.

In 1913, Arthur Nikisch and the Berlin Philharmonic made the first known recording of a complete symphony (Beethoven’s Fifth, of course). Nikisch was an international star in a time when many conductors relied more on flamboyance than scholarship. Nikisch was different and his musicianship stands out on this old, old recording. See what you think, this Sunday at six.

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.

In 1623, Heinrich Schutz, working in Dresden during the privations of the Thirty Years War, wrote an oratorio for Easter that was the first known such work by a German composer. Admittedly, it isn’t a terribly cheerful work, but for Schutz these were not terribly cheerful times. And 399 Easters later, we’ll feature it on Mozart’s Attic.

Paul Hindemith, Kurt Weill, Sergei Rachmaninoff and Igor Stravinsky had little in common — except that they chose not to live and work in their native countries: On this week’s program, we’ll listen to some music from these four composers who chose to absent themselves from the Third Reich and the Soviet Union.

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.

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.

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.

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.