Haydn and Mozart were both connoisseurs (in music and life) of human passions: elevated, loving, violent, uncertain, spiritual and secular. "Passione" is a journey through the extremes of human feeling. The overture of Haydn's first oratorio, Il ritorno di Tobia, is a brilliant study in contrasts, from somber foreboding to dizzying virtuosity. It ends with a harmonic ambivalence that will raise many an eyebrow, especially at the time. 

Mozart's tender expressions in his early concert aria "Alcandro, lo confesso" were his first nods to the soprano Aloysia Weber, with whom he soon fell in love. Haydn's Passion Symphony is a secular work with theatrical origins, which later got its name because of a performance at Passion time shortly after the ban on secular music was lifted. It contrasts the serious and the buffo in the finest Haydn style. Two of Mozart's masterpieces complete the program: his stunning "Ch'io mi scordi di te" for soprano and piano obbligato, which expresses unwavering, loving loyalty in the face of great adversity, and his final Viennese piano concerto in C major: a piece that perfectly balances light and shade, sorrow and joy, and ends in deep, glorious affirmation.