Starting this Saturday and covering two weekends, the Honolulu Symphony is presenting its first festival in many years.

Unlike season concerts, festival concerts are grouped around a theme, do not repeat, and are presented in close succession, so that audiences can attend every performance. The experience is intentionally concentrated, a time during which quotidian life is set aside and friends gather each evening to compare pieces, performances and artists.

Music festivals come in myriad types, celebrating a composer, genre, era, city, ethnicity, local artists or composers — almost anything imaginable — but it is no surprise that most are dedicated to the great masters of classical music.

Festivals also tend to have an educational bent, eliciting questions not only about what is presented but about what is not. Some participants pick up biographies to read alongside the concerts, and established festivals sometimes offer booklets, lectures or workshops to provide context.

For this festival — perhaps the first annual, should it prove popular — conductor Andreas Delfs is focusing on Beethoven (born 1770, died 1827), and specifically on orchestral masterworks of Beethoven's middle period, circa 1803 to 1814.

The Honolulu Symphony Orchestra performed Beethoven's only late symphony and his most famous late work, the Ninth Symphony, last December as both year-end tradition and prelude to this festival.

Each of the four festival concerts includes an overture, a concerto and a symphony. The programs dip into the end of Beethoven's early period for one overture, providing some insight to the transition into his middle period, but most pieces epitomize the known Beethoven.

Of Beethoven's nine symphonies, the Honolulu Symphony will perform four: the Third ("Eroica," meaning Heroic); Fifth ("Fate"); Sixth ("Pastoral"); and Seventh. These are the monuments that redefined the genre and created a symphonic ideal that still holds sway.

"Eroica" arose out of Europe's politics, and there is a wonderful story about Beethoven and Napoleon that will surely appear in the program notes, but the revolutionary hero that Beethoven portrays in "Eroica" is more accurately his musical self.

"Eroica" is far longer than any previous symphony, and in the meandering river of history, it stands as a watershed that forever changed Western classical music. After its two-note "fanfare," it begins quietly, even humbly, but it proceeds with inexorable logic and stunning power through the famous funeral march and lightening-fast scherzo to the almost schizophrenic finale.

Symphony No. 5 expands on that power, opening with possibly the most famous theme ever written — the "da-da-da-dummmm" of Fate, which appears in almost every measure and guise. The theme piles up upon itself, becoming shorter and shorter, building to a moment of almost unbearable tension, reduced to a single note shouted back and forth between winds and strings before resolving. It is a brilliant display of musical discourse through tonal relationships, unrivaled before or since. Orchestras hesitate to program it because it is so well known, but if you know only one Beethoven symphony, this should be it.

For the concertos, Delfs chose two of Beethoven's five piano concertos — No. 3 and No. 5 (the "Emperor") — the Violin Concerto in D major, and the Triple Concerto for Violin, Cello and Piano.

Music students study other composers to learn concerto form and how it is supposed to work, but they study Beethoven to learn how to break all the rules.

Beethoven brings in the soloist when the orchestra "should be" alone, presents sections in the "wrong" order, inserts unrelated keys to create his famous otherworldly "purple patches," has one instrument jump into the return of the main theme two measures before the other instruments — in short, he surprises at every turn.

Featured artists include violinist Robert McDuffie from Mercer University in Georgia, who performs on the 1735 Guarneri del Gesu violin known as the "Ladenburg"; the Israeli-American cellist Yehuda Hanani, who studied with the legendary Leonard Rose and Pablo Casals, and now teaches at the Cincinnati Conservatory of Music; violinist Ignace ("Iggy") Jang, concertmaster for the Honolulu Symphony and on the faculty at the University of Hawai'i-Manoa; and Irish pianist John O'Conor, who studied with Wilhelm Kempff and specializes in Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert.

Soloist in three of the four concerts, O'Conor has recorded the complete set of Beethoven piano sonatas, and in 2008, he released a recording of all five piano concertos with the London Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Delfs. The recordings should prove an interesting comparison with the festival concerts.

Out of Beethoven's many and varied overtures, Delfs chose the overture to "The Creatures of Prometheus," the earliest work on the program, and one of only two ballets Beethoven worked on; the condensed and dramatic overture to Heinrich Joseph von Collin's play "Coriolan"; and two versions of the overture to Beethov-en's only opera.

Beethoven struggled to compose his opera, writing, "Of all my children, this is the one that cost me the worst birth pangs, the one that brought me the most sorrows."

The opera first appeared as "Leonore," and there are three versions of its overture: "No. 1," composed third and performed only posthumously; "No. 2," composed first and performed with the original opera; and "No. 3," composed for an early revision of the opera, but which exceeded the realm of overtures now usually performed in concert. In 1814, still unsatisfied with the opera, Beethoven completely revised it into the version most often heard today, entitled "Fidelio."

The Honolulu Symphony is performing "Leonore" No. 3 and "Fidelio" to open the first two concerts, the juxtaposition revealing how Beethoven derived such different works for the same overture.