We begin our 60th season with a concert that is titanic and bold, heroic and celebratory–composed by acknowledged giants of musical composition.

The Hungarian March from the Damnation of Faust is a rousing military march, heavy with brass and percussion. The melody is based on a traditional tune that’s the unofficial state anthem of Hungary. Composer Hector Berlioz was referred to as both madman and genius for his flamboyant use of sound and odd musical effects. He paints the picture of a battalion of soldiers passing by with his instrumental wizardry.

Felix Mendelssohn, just 22 when he wrote his Piano Concerto No. 1, is one of the most naturally gifted musicians who has ever lived. Guest artist Orion Weiss will tackle this piece full of glittering passagework, like so many stars in the Montana night sky. The fiery first movement opens with a bravura display, then yields to a gentler Andante, or song without words. A fanfare of trumpets announces the final third movement, a quicksilver rondo full of breathlessly high-spirited dialogue.

Tom Service, writing about Mahler’s “Titan” for The Guardian on the 50 Greatest Symphonies says: "It’s one of the most spellbinding moments of symphonic inspiration in the 19th century: the opening of Gustav Mahler’s First Symphony. It’s not a theme, an idea, a melody, or a rhythm, but a state of being: a seven-octave-spread A, played as quietly and ethereally as possible by the strings, a shimmer of sonority that sounds out the whole compass of the orchestra. It’s the symphony as space as much as time, and whatever its familiarity to us 21st century sophisticates, when we hear this music, we should try and recreate some of the sense of wonder that audiences at the piece’s premiere in Budapest in 1889 must have felt, when Mahler–not yet 30–conducted the symphony.”

Mahler himself described the first movement as “the waking of Nature after a long winter.” He called the finale, From Hell, “the sudden explosion of despair coming from a deeply wounded heart." Tom Service writes: “... whose final movement will rail against the cosmos with symphonic music's most terrifying expressionist outburst, and which, at the end of its drama, will find a sheer musical joy that’s both a transcendence of the bodily and the spiritual, in the most uninhibited, tumultuous noise the orchestra had yet made.”

Get Tickets