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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.

By the turn of the 18th century, Vienna, the musical center of Europe, the city of Mozart and Haydn, was ready for something new and exciting, and that’s what it got with the arrival of Beethoven. One of the early large-canvas works from this period was the Piano Concerto No. 3, our featured work this Sunday.

By 1804, Beethoven’s formidable output of piano music had slowed considerably. His one sonata of that year was the very short No. 22.He had other things up his sleeve, and one of those was the watershed Eroica Symphony. we’ll hear it this Sunday night — and we’ll hear that short sonata as well, as we work our way through the entire cycle of the Beethoven sonatas.

When we left nine-year-old Mozart last week, he was in London with his family and with four symphonies to his credit. Even though only two of those were authentically his, still that’s not bad for a kid that age.

Benjamin Britten wrote his War Requiem for the consecration of new cathedral in Coventry, England, to stand next to the ruins of the 14th-century church that had been destroyed in a World War II bombing raid. We’ll hear a performance of Britten’s anti-war paean, timely once again, on this Sunday’s program.

Contemporary English composer John Rutter is celebrated for the pageantry of his anthems, and his music received some prominent use during the recent jubilee celebrations for Queen Elizabeth II.. We’ll look at his 1985 Requiem as our featured work this Sunday.

We begin thiis Sunday with music of Shostakovich, Prokofiev, and Stravinsky. Then we look at works by Mozart contemporaries Franz Danzi and Carl Stamitz, as we also check in on Mozart himself, continuing along with our cycle of his complete symphonies — a project we began last July.

This Sunday we’ll hear the second in our series of the three ballets scored by Igor Stravinsky for Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes in the years before World War I — compositions that estabished him as one of the major composers of that new century.

In 1717, the exceedingly unpopular King George I of England enlisted court composer George Frederic Handel to write some music for a floating concert on the Thames. King George remained unpopular, but folks by the thousands lined the river banks to hear Handel’s Water Music, our featured work this Sunday.

It’s a December tradition on Mozart’s Attic, and we’ll have our annual performance of George Frederic Handel’s Messiah, complete, this Sunday. Justin Doyle conducts the Berlin Academy for Old Music with soloists and chorus in a newly-released CD of everyone’s favorite oratorio.