A pair of Mendelssohns will open and close the opening concert of the Warren Philharmonic Orchestra’s 2022-23 season.

However, it’s not a pair of works by Felix Mendelssohn. His Symphony No. 4 in A Major will close Sunday’s concert, titled “Luminous and Dancing Spirits!” but the program at Warren’s First Presbyterian Church will open with Overture in C Major, the only orchestral work written by his sister, Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel.

The 11-minute piece was written by Hensel in the early 1830s, but it wasn’t published until 1994 after it was discovered in the Mendelssohn archives.

“It’s really quite a wonderful piece,” Conductor Susan Davenny Wyner said. “It has drama, tenderness. It starts very tenderly, but she’s not afraid to go into thunderstorms and peckish Shakespearean moments. She deals with the form pretty well, and I know if she had more opportunity to write for orchestra, she would have continued to shape and model things.”

Hensel (1805-1847) is known for the choral and solo works she composed, but she lived in an era when women weren’t encouraged to be composers. Wyner found the piece while looking for a work by a female composer for Sunday’s concert, which is dedicated to Patricia Latham, who died in 2021 and had a lifelong passion for theater and dance.

“How wonderful would it be to have a piece by a woman who was not given the opportunities to have a public career, even though she was a prodigy and extraordinarily gifted,” Wyner said. “Her father discouraged her and even her brother — who adored her and often would not compose a piece without running it by her first and having her edit it — because of his position in society discouraged her.”

Wyner can hear some similarities between the siblings, but each is distinctive.

‘They were trained in that Germanic way to admire the work of J.S. Bach,” she said. “There are areas where certainly Felix is using some of the great master’s tools in his own ways and, in a couple of sections, I think Fanny does that too.”

Symphony No. 4 in A Major, known as the Italian Symphony, probably was written by Felix Mendelssohn around the same times his sister wrote her overture.

“The Italian Symphony is so full of character,” Wyner said. “It starts with such vibrancy (with its dance-inspired movements). That excited me to have those as beginning and end (of the program). That embrace of the brother and sister would be out out of the box, and I think Patty was out of the box in her thinking.”

The dance motif in Mendelssohn’s work will be carried through in the rest of the program, which will include Nikos Skalkottas’ “Five Greek Dances,” Aaron Copland’s “Hoe-Down” from his “Rodeo” suite, Antonin Dvorak’s Slavonic Dance in e minor Op. 72 no 2 and Manuel De Falla’s “Ritual Fire Dance.”

“Hoe-down” will be a great showcase for the orchestra’s sting section, Wyner said, and the Dvorak’s piece has been a favorite since she was a child and she heard the Cleveland Orchestra perform it conducted by George Szell. “Ritual Fire Dance,” a piece from ballet “El amor brujo” where a woman is trying to exorcise the ghost of her late husband, was a perfect choice for a pre-Halloween concert.

“He makes the instruments really evoke the fire, both in the way it snaps and crackles, and in the exotic nature of the character who is playing the piece,” she said.

If you go …

WHAT: “Luminous and Dancing Spirits!” — Warren Philharmonic Orchestra with Susan Davenny Wyner, conductor

WHEN: 3 p.m. Sunday

WHERE: First Presbyterian Church, 256 Mahoning Ave. NW, Warren

HOW MUCH: $30 for adults, $15 for students and free for children ages 12 and younger when accompanied by a paying adult. For more information, go to www.warren philharmonic.org or call 330-399-3606.