The late 1920s represented the height of artistic freedom in Germany -- after World War I and the inflation crisis, and before Hitler, the Third Reich and the Second World War. Playwright Bertolt Brecht and composer Kurt Weill teamed up in 1928 to produce The Threepenny Opera, a musical set among the characters of the Weimar Republic underworld.
We'll have period recordings of The Threepenny Opera, including original cast members like Lotte Lenya and Rudolph Forster. And we'll have Otto Klemperer conducting the winds and brasses of the Berlin Opera in some orchestral versions of Weill's score.
Then we go to the halcyon days of the Dresden Orchestra with a concerto by Johann David Heinichen. E. Power Biggs plays a little fugue that maybe Bach wrote and maybe he didn't. Rachel Barton Pine solos in Mozart's Violin Concerto No. 4, and Herbert von Karajan conducts Beethoven's Eighth Symphony.