Tag Archives: Gustav Mahler

MTT & MAHLER: The Terrifying 6th Symphony

MICHAEL TILSON THOMAS conducts the San Francisco Symphony in Mahler’s 6th Symphony, March 30, 2023:

This giant and terrifying symphony was performed by the San Francisco Symphony with greatness as led by Michael Tilson Thomas.

Please note: Despite the fact that “terrifying” is the description, do not ever pass up an opportunity to hear it. It has a unique greatness and universal importance. It reaches each listener deeply, as though Mahler addresses us personally and the world at the same time.

Michael Tilson Thomas became Music Director of the SFS in 1995. He made San Francisco a Mahler town. Mahler’s name was painted on the Muni buses. MTT’s Mahler concerts were always sold out. In addition to his 12 Grammy Awards, he shared his musical knowledge and love. We all have grown through his gifts. The standing ovation that welcomed MTT as he entered the stage was given due to the respect and admiration the city continues to hold for him. He is now the Music Director Laureate of the San Francisco Symphony, conductor Laureate of the London Symphony, co-founder, artistic director laureate of the New World Symphony, and has conducted every major orchestra of the US and Europe.

Michael Tilson Thomas, Music Director Laureate, San Franciso Symphony

We stood in respectful attention, applauding him to salute him and show our thanks, and then, he conducted music that terrified us all. I mean amazing, innovative, nightmare music composed exactly to warn us: something is coming. This music grabs the listener’s heart and comes this close to ripping it from the listener’s chest.

What is it all about? Mahler himself was stuck between thinking modern music would have an “underlying program,” and knowing that if stories, emotions, or experiences would be spelled out, the music will go flat as the listeners will not really be listening or baring their hearts to this very particular experience. So, he does not give up answers to the riddles.

From the first sounds of the first movement, Allegro Energico, Ma Non Troppo, we are in a threatening world. The music begins with quiet drums, the sound to accompany an army. When we first hear them they are far away, but the drums come nearer and louder. Soon, they are all around us. Trumpets and then oboes sweep in and over us. Suddenly, the music becomes more lyrical. The violins alternate with woodwinds. The music abruptly shifts to this swirling beauty, but it does not last. According to Michael Steinberg, the great writer of SFS’s program notes, the composer’s wife, Alma Mahler, believed this music is portraying her. I believe that she believed that, but, personally, I would not want to be the character in this passage. This music is on a precipice too high, too steep; the character – if in fact Mahler thought of a physical, living being identified in the music – the music character is going to be taken by surprise by another character carrying a big knife. That feels right. Mahler knew what was coming, I cannot believe Alma is there, but as the movement moves toward its end the marching returns. There is a powerful recapitulation. The Alma music returns. Is this a win for Alma? I do not think it will be. Some of this music changes direction roughly, quickly. I hear the changes to loveliness from threats and back again. Mahler is ironic. The sweepingly gentle sounds are not meant to stay. They are there to be eaten by predators. Human predators.

Gustav Mahler, born July 7.1860, Kaliste, Bohemia, died May 18, 1911, Vienna

In rehearsals for the premiere, of his Symphony No. 6, Mahler was torn between having the Scherzo come before the Andante Moderato or vice versa. There were revisions after the first performance, but, in 1963, for the Critical Complete Edition, the editor, Erwin Ratz, settled on keeping the Scherzo second. It has stayed that way for most conductors. Mahler reversed the order of these movements in his second performance of No. 6 and in the second edition. Later, he regretted the change and Ratz believed that Mahler had wanted to go back to the first version.

The Scherzo has ragged rhythms. Nothing is metrically solid or predictable. It is extremely modern for its era in that way. Once again, Alma Mahler recorded her perception of the music. She thought that it represents “the arrhythmical play of little children.” Are the children of the music trying to run away? Are they imps, devilish but not cute- devilish? If they are playing – if there is in the music any vision of physical, solid personages – is that an image that Gustav Mahler would want us to see? The Scherzo’s sounds are broken up, wrenched around, even violent. If Mahler intended images of children, and I doubt it, they are either bad children kicking and beating on each other, or the music again has irony and sarcasm in it. If children are there, they are being lashed and brutally stomped.

After the harsh Scherzo, the Andante Moderato is melodic with gorgeous harmonies. There are sudden reminders of the hints of tranquility which were threatened by the marchers in the first movement. The cowbells played in the Allegro come back. The color and glimpses of love and loveliness waft about us. The Andante is a refuge from the violent Scherzo. Will we be allowed to stay in the refuge?

Absolutely not.

The Finale is longer than the first movement and longer than the two middle movements combined. The distant sound of cowbells in the Allegro, the first movement, is a reminder of a perfect place. It is far away, pastoral, peaceful. Nothing else, nowhere else is. The orchestra for this symphony is grand in numbers as well as in the music they create. There are many of each instrument. For example, there are 4 bassoons, plus a contrabassoon, 8 horns, 6 trumpets, 3 trombones plus a bass trombone. There are 2 timpani players, and a vast variety of percussion: bass drum, chimes, cowbells, cymbals, glockenspiel, hammer, rute*, 2 snare drums, tam-tam, triangle, and xylophone. *A rute is a bundle of birch twigs/sticks used to brush against a bass drum.

The Finale begins with the sound that something dropped; it is a low C. Then, there are many different instruments playing strangely together but not simultaneously and not playing the same thing. This music pulls our mental rug out from under our feet. What is going on? Why do I hear the harp, the woodwinds, more strings making these strange sounds? It is as though they are playing from different worlds, making music that jerks and pulls at each sound. The violins go rogue on their own. The drummers have a vicious sound in their relentless march. What is called the “fate” chord appears in multiple variations. The audience feels the music and seems to be forced to watch and know in their hearts the disintegration of what we had thought was the order of life, of our universe, or, at least, the order in musical sounds.

The lead percussionist appears in the empty chorus above the stage. He is seated on the lowest row. He has in his hand a hammer. It is huge. He strikes with it, and we feel the enormous sound reverberate in our spines. The music returns with an increased energy expressing the soldiers’ march growing ever more insistent and intense. They are coming for us. The music grows more wild and emphatic and scary. The hammer strikes again. The music changes. It is funereal. It blows away, losing force, becoming very quiet, nearly silent. There is a final huge, explosive A minor chord. The music has fulfilled its promise; it began with this chord and has returned, and so have the drums.

The music was terrifying. Michael Steinberg uses the metaphor of a hero “in the full flood of confidence and exaltation a hammer-blow strikes him down.” That is one way to think of what is happening in the music; it echoes a reflection written by Mahler. For me, that hammer blow was not aimed at only one person. It is an emblem of destruction. The horror of Symphony No. 6 is fitting for our world today. Extinctions of so many species. Water and air pollution shorten humans life expectancy. Money from fossil fuel corporations pollute politics. Wars, famine, gigantic fires, hurricanes, floods. Gustav Mahler died in 1911, three years from the start of World War I. What would have happened to him if he had lived deeper into the 20^th century? Michael Steinberg, a child born in Germany, 1926, was saved by the Kindertransport to England, in 1939. Later, he moved to the US. Michael Steinberg reports in his program notes that Mahler believed the artist could “intuit, even to experience, events before they occur, that in fact he cannot escape the pain of such foreknowledge.” Mahler had experienced personal tragedy in 1907: his daughter Maria died, he discovered he had a serious, not curable heart ailment, and his directorship of the Vienna Opera ended in bad circumstances. However, perhaps through dreadful, personal knowledge and experience, he gave the world a warning of world-destroying tragedy.

SF Symphony & Michael Tilson Thomas: BRILLIANT!

The San Francisco Symphony started the New Year and their music director Michael Tilson Thomas’s 25th and final year with a brilliant concert. The ovations given to MTT promise that his devoted audience will not let him go easily. Among his many gifts, Maestro MTT is a magician of the art of program design. January 5 – 12, SFS and MTT presented Overture to Benvenuto Cellini, Opus 23, (1837) by Hector Berlioz; Meditations on Rilke (2019), by Michael Tilson Thomas; selections from Des Knaben Wunderhorn (1892-1898), by Gustav Mahler; and La Valse (1920), by Maurice Ravel. Each work was performed with zest, deep feeling, flawless musicianship. There was a distant but worthy relationship between Meditations on Rilke and Des Knaben Wunderhorn that increased the audience’s appreciation of both. Do you have a great-uncle who is related only by marriage to someone who is your great-aunt living in another state, but you are crazy about him? It’s that kind of relation.

Hector Berlioz (1801-1869) French

The Overture to Benvenuto Cellini premiered in Paris, in 1838. The Overture was a hit, but the opera for which it was written was not. The story goes that all composers wanted to have their music performed there; regrettably, performances there were famous for being sloppy and under rehearsed. “The Overture was extravagantly applauded,” wrote Berlioz, “the rest was hissed with exemplary precision.” What a grand disappointment! The Overture in the SFS’s rousing performance on January 12 was full of musical interest from gorgeous melodies to a lively allegro. There is a melody for the woodwinds that represents Harlequin at a carnival. In fact, the Overture has so much character and rhythmic variation that it could be heard as a compact opera in itself. Far from a lightweight curtain opener for the evening, this Overture deserves the fine performance it received. Hearing it again will reward the listener with more insight to its structure and colors and great enjoyment.

Michael Tilson Thomas (born December, 1944) American, born in California

MTT has composed other works in which a text is the inspiration or accompaniment for the music. These include Three Songs to Poems by Walt Whitman (1999); Poems of Emily Dickinson (2002); and From the Diary of Anne Frank (2018) for narrator and orchestra. The premiere performances of Meditations on Rilke at Davies Symphony Hall, Jan. 5 -12, created a great event. In addition to the SFS, mezzo-soprano, Sasha Cooke, and bass-baritone, Ryan McKinny embodied the Rilke poetry which became exciting and lovely songs as MTT created them. The singers were a great pair for these songs. The composer-conductor tells that these songs came about by reflecting on events in his father’s life. A fine pianist, his father and friends got stuck without money in Oatman, AZ. His father filled the cafe-bar’s need for a piano player. His playing merged classical works, Gershwin and Irving Berlin songs with performances of requests such as the Bear Fat Fling. It is not 100% clear how that experience in the 1930s relates to MTT’s choice of poems by Rilke for his new songs, except that the Rilke works do resonate with sounds originating in contemporary classical music, maybe a bit of Mahler, perhaps a reference to Schubert, but over all Michael Tilson Thomas. This work was a huge favorite with the audience and has dazzling musical complexities woven in among the moods and melodies that unite it.

Rainier Maria Rilke (1875-1926)Bohemian (Czech)-Austrian

Rainier Maria Rilke is read by some to be a mystic and by others to be an existentialist poet trying to find peace in a time of anxiety and isolation. His work is lyrical and searching, such a fitting partner to MTT’s music. His consolation for his readers was “Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to learn to love the questions.” The San Francisco Symphony promises the release of recordings of this and other MTT music later this year.

Gustav Mahler (1860-1911) born in Bohemia (now Czech Republic)

Four Songs from Des Knaben Wunderhorn provided a brief but satisfying venture into Mahler-land, a destination MTT has made his own. Sasha Cooke returned to sing the folk song styled works from a collection that was published in 1805. The Romantic movement embraced the music and stories of national or ethnic origins, even when it was written and arranged anew. The four songs performed by the SFS and Ms Cooke expressed the trials of living in the country, loss of love and loss of life. The songs might begin with a cheerful outlook but also were somber and alluded to barely hidden sadness. Ms Cooke delved into these emotions with understanding and appreciation for both the lyrics and the wonderful music. It was a performance revealing a root of the Romantic experience of life.

Maurice Ravel (1875-1937) French

La Valse, poeme choregraphique pour orchestre is such a fabulous, swirling piece that the listener feels as though she has been lifted up, repeatedly turned fast in the air, and, before long, danced so quickly and become so dizzy that she sails through the air forgetting that eventually she will fall. It is an emphatic, ever growing dance that dances itself. The room spins, but the dance does not care. Ravel originally planned a tribute to Johann Strauss. By 1920, after World War I and the destruction of much of a generation, the gracious image of waltzing was no more. The sound of this work becomes a terror. The ballroom where it takes place seems haunted by evil. It is a piece of music not to be missed, especially if the listener is willing to imagine himself in that scene and, by doing that, understand better the cost of war. Bravo, Ravel! Bravo, San Francisco Symphony!

Mahler’s 9th Meets MTT: Not a Farewell

Gustav Mahler (July 7, 1860 – May 18, 1911)

Gustav Mahler composed nine symphonies and began his tenth. His Symphony No. 9 was completed in April, 1910, one year before his death, and premiered June, 1912, one year after. With ahistorical hindsight, many have regarded the 9th as a summation of the composer’s life and a farewell to life and music. This is faulty history and a bad way to hear the complex, astonishing music. In the course of this ninety minute symphony, one may hear myriad forces of nature, human experience, and the poignant, irregular pulse in the music. There are pauses; floods of sweeping phrases; galumphing, country dances; a final, transcendent adagio. The movements end as though falling apart, with a harsh punch, or evaporate into another form of being. This writer has heard it said the Mahler’s Symphony No. 9 is not the most sought after for performance. It happens in multiple dimensions at once. It cannot be summed up — it is not “the one with a thousand voices”–it is music made of Mahler’s measureless understanding of music. In the few years preceding his death, Mahler’s life was full of events. He resigned from a ten year tenure as the Artistic Director of the Vienna Court Opera, a role in which he and the orchestra flourished despite constant difficulties, not least the anti-Semitic attacks on Mahler. He desired more time for composing. His four year old daughter, Maria, died. Within days of her death, Mahler learned he had a severe heart problem and needed to curb his activities. An energetic outdoorsman, hiker, swimmer, Mahler was forced to limit the athleticism he loved. This was not a time of giving up: he became Director of the New York Philharmonic and composed Das Lied von der Erde. He continued to lead a life of creative accomplishment and leadership given to large institutions. He was not an artist in retirement or an invalid marking time. Having seen tv dramas in which someone plays more than one chess game simultaneously, and having tried but not pursued playing even one chess game at a time, one could imagine an unusual person succeeding at that but could not guess how . The structure of Mahler’s Symphony No. 9 has a multi-layered complexity put together in a way that creates a unified beauty. It encompasses human emotions and the endless fascination of the natural world. To know one flower, one must look closely and also envision the earth.

Michael Tilson Thomas, Music Director of San Francisco Symphony

Michael Tilson Thomas conducted the superb, mind-opening, heart-tearing performances of Mahler’s Symphony No. 9, June 13-16, 2019. The Hedgehogs attended the June 16th concert which will be Maestro Tilson Thomas’ last performance with the SFS until his return on September 4. He is taking a leave to have heart surgery, in Cleveland. He was to conduct the Symphony’s programs programs June 20-22 and June 27-30. His composition, Street Song for Symphonic Brass, on the program for June 20-22, will not be performed. His devoted following, truly a chorus of thousands, wish him well and await his return.

SF Symphony: Transcendent Concert of Berg & Mahler

Michael Tilson Thomas, Music Director

It is rare to hear a concert by the San Francisco Symphony that is not superb, gorgeous, interesting, entertaining. One can easily run out of fresh adjectives and re-use the same ones that are useful to describe the experience of a beautiful performance of beautiful music. The concert on March 24, 2018, however, soared into another realm. Music Director Michael Tilson Thomas conducted the program of Alban Berg’s Violin Concerto (1935) with violinist Gil Shaham as guest artist and Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 5 in C-sharp minor (1902). The performance surpassed any expectations.

Albano Maria Johannes (Alban) Berg (1885-1935)

Berg’s Concerto for Violin and Orchestra is doubly tragic. Berg died the day before Christmas the year he wrote the concerto; the concerto was his last completed work. It was written to commemorate Manon Gropius, daughter of Alma Mahler Werfel, Mahler’s widow, and architect Walter Gropius. At age eighteen, Manon died from polio. Berg had known her since her childhood. He wrote “To the Memory of an Angel.” on the manuscript. He dedicated the work to Louis Krasner, a violinist based in Boston who had asked Berg early in 1935 to write a concerto for him. Krasner played the premiere, 1936, in Barcelona. The concerto sums up the passages of the life lost so young. It has two two-part movements. The first is Andante-Allegretto; the second Allegro-Adagio. The Andante has an ethereal, daydreaming atmosphere: a girl watching clouds scud through the sky. The Allegretto is playful and dancing. In the last part, the drama of the girl almost growing up and then twisted with pain grabs the listener physically just below the ribs. The structure of the music in the Adagio refers to a chorale of the Lutheran church that prays “It is enough! Lord, if it pleases You.” The terror of Manon and for her; the need for resignation in the face of inevitable death; the struggle of life to remain alive is reenacted in the soloist striving over the other strings. In the end, the solo violin seems to resolve the pain. There can be acceptance and a fitting harmony with loss.

Gil Shaham, Violinist

Gil Shaham is an extraordinary violinist. His gifts are of the heart as well as in his hands. He plays with verve and power and also tenderness and anguish. His presence as a performer lights up all of Davies Hall.

Gustav Mahler (1860-1911)

Mahler’s Symphony No. 5 travels from sounds of a funeral to renewal of life. There is so much variety of emotion, experience, exaltation on the way that the listener’s senses rocket from depths to heights and back again. Holding one’s breath, afraid to miss any single event in this music it is as though by living with the music one can experience multitudes of lives from the inside rather than from observation. Maestro Michael Tilson Thomas is justly renown for conducting, teaching, expanding Mahler’s audience. The SF Symphony met every challenge of the music and fulfilled their Maestro’s vision. This is the Mahler symphony with the Adagietto, now so famous that it is often played as a separate piece on classical radio. This quiet, very slow movement could be “Mahler’s heartache” as described by the late music writer, Michael Steinberg, or it could be the most purely sensuous classical music ever written. The symphony ends with raucous, joyful music shouting with exuberance. The listener lived in the music as Michael Tilson Thomas seems to have every phrase and its musical meaning in every cell of himself.

Conducting without a score, the Maestro reminded me of Charles Dickens traveling the world, taking all the parts to enact scenes from his novels. Now, imagine someone else, not the writer of Tolstoy’s War and Peace or Dickens’ Bleak House being able to recite and act the whole of one of those enormous books with nearly countless characters, events, plots, subplots, descriptions of landscapes and ballrooms. That’s what Michael Tilson Thomas does conducting Mahler. It was a transcendent performance.

Hedgehog Highlight on Berg’s Three Pieces for Orchestra, livelyfoundation.org/wordpress/?p=669 Hedgehog Highlight on Mahler’s Symphony No. 2, livelyfoundation.org/wordpress/?p=1585

www.sfsymphony.com, gilshaham.com, michaeltilsonthomas.com

photo of Michael Tilson Thomas courtesy the San Francisco Symphony

SF Symphony Tonight! Boreyko, Bernstein, Shostakovich

The Hedgehogs are very excited about tonight’s performance at the San Francisco Symphony. Andrey Boreyko will conduct two exquisite pieces by Leonard Bernstein, Divertimento and Serenade, and the Symphony No. 5 of Shostakovich. Featured artist is Vadim Gluzman, violin.

Just a week ago, we heard Maestro Boreyko conduct his orchestra, the Naples Philharmonic, in Naples, FL. It was a memorable, outstanding performance. There he conducted Bernstein’s Serenade and Mahler’s Symphony No. 5. As both Hedgehogs had never before heard the Serenade, we were delighted by the beauty, wit, and inventiveness of this work. Our wish to hear it again comes true tonight. The Naples Philharmonic, under Boreyko’s direction, presented a deeply moving, triumphant performance of the Mahler. Even Mahler lovers brought up by Michael Tilson Thomas could stand with hats off for this musical journey from pain to glory. Shostakovich’s Symphony No.5 is an enormous work which may present deeply coded messages about the Stalinist regime which often persecuted Russian artists, including Shostakovich. Though he won some approval for this symphony, his art was always a passionate resistance.

Pictures: Top: Leonard Bernstein, Middle: Shostakovich

SF Symphony: Mahler & Michael Tilson Thomas

Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 2 in C minor, often called the “Resurrection” Symphony, made up the entire program at San Francisco’s Davies Symphony Hall, Saturday, July 2. There is more than enough beauty, mystery, passion, and inspiration to fill multiple performances of this one masterpiece. Music Director and Conductor Michael Tilson Thomas led his orchestra through a lifetime in ninety minutes of experience, poetry, struggle and sublime music.

Mahler:MTT Michael Tilson Thomas conducting Mahler

MTT has established a reputation as a profound artist and interpreter of Mahler. The many Grammy awards for his Mahler recordings with the SF Symphony attest to that. However, there is never anything “been there, done that” about his performances. At this one, the SFS and its Maestro were truly imbued with Mahler’s energy and spirit. It was as though they channeled the composer and brought him back to us. As Mahler wrote in the poetry sung in the triumphant last movement, “With wings that I have won/in the heat of love’s struggle/I will soar/to the light that no eye can comprehend.” In this performance of the Resurrection symphony, it was Mahler himself who rose again. For the audience, his vision became our vision. We were lifted beyond ourselves.

KarinaGauvin Mezzo-Soprano Kelley O’Connor; Soprano Katrina Gauvin

The last two movements were aided and fulfilled by the soloists, Kelley O’Connor and Katrina Gauvin, and the San Francisco Symphony Chorus. When the Chorus rose as one in the loft seating above and behind the orchestra, it was one of the powerful theatrical moments of the symphony’s performance. Mahler created great, majestic music, but he did not write it to be in artistic isolation. The voices extend the life of the instruments, the presence of the singers and the chorus enlarges the community from which the music arises and in which it dwells. There are other events in the symphony that leave such a powerful image of the making of music and the mission of the music that one can see the extension of life through this art. When the percussionists all beat on their drums, both hands holding drumsticks and beating rapidly, when the horn players quietly walk off stage in order to play from afar out of sight, even when the chorus members steadily turn their pages in unison and we see the turning of the white pages against their black clothes: it is all the total theater that Mahler made in order to make his art in as many dimensions as life. Reading the descriptions of the movements suggests this: “In quietly flowing motion,” “Very solemn but simple, like hymn,” “Bursting out wildly.” The descriptive power of the music calls forth every emotion, but in the end, “Slow. Misterioso,” there is mystery. On a cd, it will sound wonderful, but being there while Michael Tilson Thomas, the San Francisco Symphony, singers and Chorus live it is totally different.

Pictures from top, Gustav Mahler; picture of Michael Tilson Thomas by Kristen Loken, courtesy of the SF Symphony; Kelley O’Connor; Katrina Gauvin.

San Francisco Symphony Soars with Schubert and Mahler

Schubert

It is possible that the SF Symphony has played as well as it did on April 9, 2016, on other occasions, but how could they have played better? It was an amazing, wonderful performance with every section playing at the top and San Francisco’s Music Director, Michael Tilson Thomas, conducting. The program itself might be matched for brilliance but hardly bettered: Symphony in B minor, the Unfinished, by Franz Schubert, and Das Lied von der Erde by Gustav Mahler. Written nearly a century apart, the two masterpieces made a powerful, emotion wrenching and heart lifting experience. While Schubert’s Symphony in B Minor is called Unfinished, it does not sound like it lacks anything. There are two movements. The first is enlivened by one of the most beautiful tunes every composed. The frequent short hand for why Schubert is so great is that glorious melodies seemed to well up in him faster than anyone could write them, certainly faster than someone who would live only 31 years (Thirty one years! Turn off the television right now. Do something. Go for a walk in a garden. Read. Listen to Schubert). Behind the beautiful tune there is darkness. Schubert breaks the melody; the suspension creates a dramatic halt of breath. Sadness darts behind the melody. There is a sense of mystery in the sadness. Perhaps Schubert stopped with these two movements because he realized he had said what he wanted to say with this music. Perhaps he could not decide where to go next, maybe because these movements are perfect as they are.

Gustav Mahler received a gift in 1907, the book The Chinese Flute translated into German. The Chinese poems inspired Mahler to write Das LIed von der Erde, The Song of the Earth. The collection includes the work of several poets of the Eighth Century. There are drinking songs, wistful songs longing for love, songs in which the poet tries to accommodate knowledge of human mortality in his delight in nature, such as in The Drinking Song of the Earth’s Sorrow. These beautiful, perceptive, delicate and yet powerful poems reached across the centuries and continents to Mahler’s heart. It was a troubled heart at this time. An avid athlete, he had learned he had a heart ailment which would strictly limit his activities and surely kill him. He had also just lost a daughter, under 5 years old, to diphtheria and scarlet fever.

At this performance, the singers were mezzo-soprano Sasha Cooke and tenor Simon O’Neill. They both performed with power and sensitivity to the poetry. Their performances were a great match to the SF Symphony’s remarkable performance. Mahler’s music engulfed Davies Symphony Hall in love and wonder at life, whole hearted engagement with our earth despite our own limitations. The San Francisco Symphony was scheduled to perform this program at Carnegie Hall, April 14, with the same singers. Surely it was a concert to knock the socks off the New Yorkers. Pictures from top: Franz Schubert, Gustav Mahler, Simon O’Neill, Sasha Cooke.