We begin this Thursday with a historic performance of Mendelssohn's "Italian" Symphony No. 4 recorded by Sir Hamilton Harty and the Halle Orchestra in 1931.
As director of the orchestra in Leipzig, Mendelssohn had both an appreciation for and access to the much-forgotten and ignored music of Bach, and as a friend of Robert Schumann, he became something of a champion of Franz Schubert as well.
We'll hear music of these three composers who really don't have much of a connection to each other at all -- and yet one of them, working in a small German city with his eyes and ears open, did much to preserve the music of the other two.