Volcanic sounds produced by a gigantic orchestra, explosive power, savage rhythmic impulses, and rending dissonances combine in Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, one of the most memorable and influential scores in the entire history of music. Its premiere in Paris in 1913 resulted in one the most famous musical scandals ever, and reverberations are still being felt more than a century later. Explosive forces are at work as well in Beethoven’s incidental music for Goethe’s play Egmont. The story of the popular hero and freedom fighter Count Lamoral van Egmont embodied virtually all the themes and principles Beethoven most cherished: freedom, courage, brotherly love, defiance of tyranny, and heroic struggle. These sentiments were expressed in some of Beethoven’s most stirring music; the overture he wrote for this portrayal remains one of the composer’s most powerful utterances. Unlike Stravinsky’s Rite and Beethoven’s Egmont, Haydn’s Symphony No.99 has no programmatic background and bears no nickname, but it is indubitably one of the grandest symphonies of all from a composer who wrote more than a hundred of them.