Festival mainstays Kristin Ahlstrom, Bjorn Ranheim, and Peter Henderson will be your guides through Beethoven’s Piano Trio in B-flat Major. Better known as the “Archduke,” its dedicatee was Archduke Rudolph of Austria, a musical dilettante and gifted amateur pianist. Full of originality, the 45-minute work was Beethoven’s final full-scale piano trio and ranges from joy to sadness with outbursts of bluff good humor. The work’s first performances with the increasingly deaf composer, accompanied by Ignaz Schuppanzigh on violin and Josef Linke on cello, would mark Beethoven’s last public appearance as a pianist.

Sit back and enjoy a quartet of cellists led by Amos Yang playing cleverly arranged versions of Mozart’s Overture to The Marriage of Figaro; Handel’s “Ombra mai fu,” the famous aria from Xerxes sung in appreciation of a plane tree; and even a hit song by the Beatles. Keeping things contemporary, Si-Yan Darren Li and Marc Damoulakis play Osvaldo Golijov’s haunting Mariel for Cello and Marimba before a quartet of percussionists round things off with Steve Reich’s hypnotic Mallet Quartet for Marimbas and Vibraphones.

Violinist Juliana Athayde and pianist Orion Weiss perform Beethoven’s effervescent “Spring” Sonata. Published in 1801, the work finds the composer in game-changing mode as he anticipates the Romantic-era gestures of Mendelssohn and Schumann. From the innocence of the opening Allegro to the joyous Rondo Finale, you can almost smell the Austrian countryside. In Mothership—a dancing scherzo where improvising soloists “dock” with the orchestral mothership—Music Director Alasdair Neale and the full orchestra will demonstrate why Mason Bates is one of America’s most popular and performed contemporary composers.