In opening its 35th Anniversary Season on Nov. 10 and 11, the Bainbridge Symphony Orchestra will celebrate its musical heritage in a program entitled “Viennese Classics.”

When selecting this repertoire, I chose to focus on the great musical capital city by programming works by composers who were either born, or who lived and worked in Vienna.

The first half of the program will feature the great Eighth Symphony of Franz Schubert, subtitled “The Unfinished.”

Schubert, a native Viennese, apparently held very high standards for himself and never felt this symphony worthy of completion, much less publication. After beginning work on the third movement, Schubert abruptly halted composition and placed the only two completed movements in a desk drawer. Forty years after that and long after the composer’s death, this masterwork was finally premiered when Schubert’s brilliance as a composer of symphonies and large-scale works was starting to become widely-known.

Following intermission, the symphony program continues with Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s “Divertimento in D Major” for string orchestra. The youthful Mozart left his family and birthplace in Salzburg in 1781 to pursue his fortunes in Vienna.

Well over 100 years later, the famous German composer, Richard Strauss, would also leave his home to take a post directing the Vienna Court Opera. As a young man, Strauss composed works for wind instruments that hearkened back to the suites and divertimenti of Mozart’s era. In the season opener, the wind section of the Bainbridge Orchestra will perform the Praeludium from Strauss’ early “Suite in Bb Major for Winds.”

Finally, no celebration of Vienna would be complete without works from the other Strauss’s — the “waltzing Johann’s!”

The program will conclude with Johann Strauss Jr.’s set

of waltzes entitled “Tales

from the Vienna Woods,” followed by the most popular work of his father – Johann Strauss, Sr.’s “Radetzky March.”

So break out the schnitzel and sachertorte, and join us.