Eivind Aadland
Yeol Eum Son Frédéric Chopin
Ludwig van Beethoven

Australian Holly Harrison (b. 1988) was inspired by luminescent road workers when she wrote the orchestral piece Hi-Vis. The title is an abbreviation for high-visibility clothing. During the 2020 shutdown, extensive evening and nighttime roadworks occurred outside her home in Sydney. Harrison found all the drilling, beeping, and flashing a refreshing reminder that people were out there. Eivind Aadland conducted the first performance with the Tasmania Symphony Orchestra in the spring of 2022.

Frédéric Chopin (1810–1849) had just turned 20 when he premiered his Piano Concerto No. 2 in his hometown of Warsaw in March 1830. He wrote the dreamlike second movement the year before, passionately in love from a distance with a soprano of the same age. All the music Chopin wrote includes the piano, and the piano concertos were his only orchestral works – a kind of necessity to succeed as a piano composer. The piano concerto was on Chopin's first concert program when he arrived in Paris in 1832, where he was soon proclaimed the great innovator of his time at the piano.

In the autumn of 1806, Ludwig van Beethoven (1770–1827) visited Count Franz von Oppersdorff at his castle today in the very south of Poland. Beethoven was coming straight from a heated argument with another nobleman who had long been his friend and benefactor. The count had his own orchestra, which welcomed the composer by playing his second symphony. Soon the count commissioned a new symphony in the same spirit, which was to become Beethoven's Symphony No. 4. With their Haydn-like gaiety, they form clear contrasts to his third and fifth symphonies.