Proudly noncosmopolitan, the California Symphony endorses laissez faire concert etiquette. Want to bring your drinks to your seat, clap when the spirit moves you, and keep your phone switched on? Please do! (With the phone in silent mode, of course.) But there’s nothing casual about the artistic and music director Donato Cabrera’s musical standards. The main event this time is Beethoven’s Third Symphony, universally known as the Eroica, or “heroic.” The name is Beethoven’s own, recalling his conception of the score as a tribute to Napoleon—the embodiment (as Beethoven then believed) of democratic Enlightenment ideals in action. Then Napoleon crowned himself emperor. In a fury, Beethoven rededicated the score to “the memory of a great man.” At this remove, you might prefer to think of it as a representation of collective humanity triumphant. The concert opens with a lively cocktail of Baroque, classical, and jazz styles the composer Jessie Montgomery calls Overture. Then, as his centerpiece, Cabrera offers Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 21, popularly known as the “Elvira Madigan.” Who’s she, and what’s her connection to Mozart? None, really. The name goes back to Bo Widerberg’s movie of 1967, which told the sad story of a 19th-century slack-rope dancer and the married cavalry officer with whom she eloped. Their summertime idyll was lovely while it lasted, but it couldn’t last. The cinematography was lovely, too, but there are those who say it was Mozart on the soundtrack—the second-movement andante from his Piano Concerto No. 21—that made Elvira Madigan the worldwide phenomenon it was. The recording was by the Mozarteum Camerata Salzburg, with Géza Anda leading from the keyboard. Cabrera’s soloist is Robert Thies, gold medalist of the International Prokofiev Competition in 1995 and the first American to win a Russian piano competition since Van Cliburn’s historic triumph at the International Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow in 1958. —Matthew Gurewitsch