Be ready to experience much, much more than a preconcert lecture and musical offering.

Built around one featured work, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra's Beyond the Score concerts grab and rivet audience attention through a highly developed multimedia presentation that swells anticipation for the performance immediately following the intermission.

Tchaikovsky's Symphony No. 4, completed during what probably was the worst year of his life, is the subject of the first of three such concerts this season at 3 p.m. Sunday.

The program's first half unfolds like a drama. You can expect to hear a well-crafted script delivered by top professional actors and coordinated with musical passages played by the CSO.

You'll see lots of projected visual images (people, places, artifacts) that help bring the story and music to life.

Tchaikovsky produced his fourth symphony around the time of his short-lived, disastrous marriage. (He also completed the opera "Eugene Onegin" and the Violin Concerto.)

"We have since learned enough about Tchaikovsky, and about the agony of repressed homosexuality, to understand why he would choose to marry a woman he didn't even know as a kind of cover," Phillip Huscher writes in the program notes.

The symphony itself can be interpreted beyond the notes, as the composer described in a letter to his longtime patroness Nadezhda von Meck, whom he never met.

"The introduction is the seed of the whole symphony, undoubtedly the main idea. This is fate, that fatal force which prevents the impulse to happiness from attaining its goal, which jealously ensures that peace and happiness shall not be complete and unclouded ..."

The finale recalls the fate theme but ends on a note of triumph.

"If you cannot discover reasons for happiness in yourself, look at others," Tchaikovsky wrote to von Meck.

To view the complete Beyond the Score concert video of Bartok's "The Miraculous Mandarin," go to www.cso.org.