Beethoven's last stand and Profokiev's Symphony No. 1 will experience a renaissance at Bangkok's 12th International Festival of Dance & Music, when the Novosibirsk State Symphony Orchestra and Opera Chorus sound off at Thailand Cultural Centre.

The Siberian company is used to bearing the brunt of such heavyweight symphonies. In their repertoire are symphonies by Mahler, Shostakovich, Rachmaninoff, Tchaikovsky and Wagner that they have fine-tuned by adhering to a rigorous touring schedule. In recent years, the orchestra has pulled the heartstrings of audiences in China, South Korea, Germany, Italy, Japan, Britain and Greece, winning a legion of fans and garnering great reviews.

The orchestra will be under the baton of the chief conductor and music director Teodor Currentzis. A whizz-kid who began playing the piano at 4, Teodor studied at the Hellenic Conservatory in the Faculty of String Instruments and Theoretical Faculty in his native Athens. From there he leapt onto the world's classical music stage putting in performances and tours of duty with the St Petersburg Philharmonic and Symphony Orchestras, the Orchestra of the Mariinsky Theatre as well as the Russian National Orchestra, in addition to conducting concert programmes at international music festivals. In 2003, he was a producing conductor of the ballet Fairy's Kiss by Igor Stravinsky at the Novosibirsk Opera and Ballet Theatre, where he became the chief conductor a year later. For a man who is not even 40, it's astonishing to note that he has realised 20 world premiers over the last few years, as well as winning two National Theatre Golden Mask Awards (the highest of honours in Russian music circles) for his masterful handling of Prokofiev's score in the ballet Cinderella (2007) and for the opera, Le Nozze di Figaro (2008).

Known as a deeply spiritual man, a philosopher and poetry fan, equally fond of playing in Catholic churches or vaults, Currentzis loves to discuss these influences and his dreams on his website. "I feel the emerald silence of the angels not with ears but intramuscularly, as a tension arising inside of a deaf-and-dumb man when he feels the vibration of the 9th symphony of Beethoven."

For this show, the conductor and his charges will intertwine these threads of history, surrealism and spirituality when they play Sergei Prokofiev's Symphony No. 1 in D major, opus 25 from 1917, which is widely known as the Classical Symphony. Hailed as one of the first neoclassical works, Symphony No. 1 riffs on Joseph Haydn without emulating him. What gives the work a more pastoral lilt, and makes it differ from Prokofiev's other symphonies, is that it was composed on holiday, when he could not write at the piano (his preferred mode of composition).

In the maestro's canon, Symphony No. 1 is one of his most beloved pieces of music. It has been staged many different times, giving rise to popular recordings by the Boston Symphony Orchestra, under the baton of Serge Koussevitzky, and the New York Philharmonic conducted by Leonard Bernstein.

For the main performance, however, the Novosibirsk State Symphony Orchestra and Opera Chorus are set to unleash a symphonic storm with Beethoven's Ninth Symphony.

The premiere of this large-scale orchestral work on May 7, 1824, at the Kamtnertor Theatre in Vienna was a momentous occasion. The theatre was crammed, the audience rapt with anticipation, for this was the first time the composer had appeared onstage in a dozen years. Because Beethoven's hearing had gone, he was reduced to setting the tempos. Sitting beside the stage, he turned the pages of his score, counting the beats for an orchestra he could not hear.

As a bridge between the Classical and Romantic eras, the Ninth Symphony is exemplary. In it he inverted some of the cliches, changing the usual pattern of classical symphonies by putting a scherzo before a slow movement. He had experimented with this arrangement before, but never in a full-scale symphony.

The composition has four movements. Beginning with a sonata that is tempestuous and sets the stage for a scherzo that is also in D minor but incorporates accents in quadruple time, Beethoven's gifts for daring and innovating are available for all to hear.

Slow and sweet as a lullaby, the third movement is lush with instrumentation. That mood of tranquility is shattered by punches and accents delivered by the whole orchestra, which foreshadows the fourth movement and its famous chorale finale, which some critics have described as a "symphony within a symphony".

Interpreting Schiller's poem, Beethoven wrote: "Joy all creatures drink / At the breasts of nature / All good, all bad / Follow her trail of roses / Kisses she gave us, and wine / A friend, proved in death / Pleasure was given to the worm / And the cherub stands before God / Before God!."

Nearing the end of his life, deaf, heartbroken and ill, the composer was dealing with the big questions of God, death, love and nature in his last work, which is in some ways an elegy for himself and what he intended as an ode to "Universal Brotherhood".

Beethoven died only two years after his final stage performance and last great work debuted, but his deathless spirit will be very much alive at Thailand Cultural Centre on September 12, when the Siberian orchestra and opera singers conjure up his musical genius.

Bangkok's 12th International Festival of Dance & Music is sponsored by Bangkok Bank, B. Grimm, Dusit Thani Bangkok, King Power Group, Post Publishing, SCG Group, Thai Airways International, Tourism Authority of Thailand and Toyota Motor (Thailand).