A double header, and what a double header. Ludwig van Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 (1824), culminating in its choral “Ode to Joy,” runs just over an hour. Likewise, Sir Michael Tippett’s oratorio A Child of Our Time (1944). In clock time, an hour is short for a stand-alone work, but given the emotional heft of these works, both are usually programmed on their own. On this occasion, though, Sir Antonio Pappano and the London Symphony Orchestra are performing them back-to-back. A Child of Our Time is Tippett’s pacifist response to Kristallnacht, the watershed Nazi pogrom of November 9 and 10, 1938, also known as the Night of (Shattered) Glass. Laid out in three sections, like Handel’s Messiah, the Tippett drops in American spirituals the way Bach dropped in popular church hymns in his settings of Christ’s Passion. The stylistic gulf between Beethoven and Tippett is vast, but in moral heroism and their drive to speak to all humankind, they are brothers. Receiving their messages with just 20 minutes of downtime to reset may be a challenge. But given musicians who rise to the occasion, what listener won’t try to do the same? —Matthew Gurewitsch