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The Eroica was the first of the so-called Great Symphonies of Beethoven. Now, two centuries later, it remains impressive, and we’ll hear it as this week’s featured work.

We’re going to spend some time in the Italian Renaissance this week, with music from Venice, Bologna, Milan, and Mantua. Then we’ll move up a few years for some music by some composers who applied for a job with the court orchestra of Dresden.

This Sunday’s program will be the 500th Mozart’s Attic, an opportunity to look back at some of the music that you listeners have said you liked over the nearly-ten-years of this endeavor. Some of the choices might be as expected, but there have been a couple of surprises too.

As a protégé of Brahms, Antonin Dvorak had a noteworthy resume in Europe when he was tapped to run a philanthropic conservatory in New York in 1892. What Dvorak heard in the New World represented a wholly new direction for American composers, and gave us a couple of timeless masterpieces to boot.

We’re going to hear everybody’s favorite battle piece, the 1812 Overture, this Sunday, but then we’re going to follow it with another musical account of battle: Sergei Prokofiev’s movie score for Sergei Eisenstein’s epic film, Alexander Nevsky.

In his 31 years, Franz Schubert managed to write some 1500 pieces of music, which tends to indicate that he must have gotten an early start. We’ll look at some music from Schubert’s salad days on this Sunday’s program.

There’s no great musical tradition surrounding Thanksgiving; the best we can do is to gather some of the music that was being heard around England and Holland around 1620. So that’s what we’ll do: a concert of "Tunes the Pilgrims Left Behind" on this week’s program.

Unlike Antonio Vivaldi’s famous Four Seasons, Franz Josef Haydn's Oratorio The Seasons looks at the passage of the year from the perspective of the country folk in an allegorical portrayal of a year well spent and a life well lived.

George Gershwin wrote his Rhapsody in Blue, and Ferde Grofe orchestrated it for a jazz band all within five weeks in 1924. This is not the Rhapsody as most of us know it today. What would happen if Gershwin via piano roll were to "jam" with a modern jazz band using Grofe's score?

This Sunday we continue our progress through the symphonies of Dmitri Shostakovich and look at some music from places we don't generally associate with Western classical music as we sample the works of composers from South America, Africa, Asia, and Australia.