MTT: YUJA WANG & MAHLER 1

January 27, 28 & 29, 2022

Overview

When it comes to musical fireworks it doesn’t get any more exciting than Yuja Wang, Music Director Laureate Michael Tilson Thomas, and the SF Symphony. They join forces for a piece loved equally by pianists and audiences, Franz Liszt’s tempestuous First Piano Concerto. The program concludes with Gustav Mahler’s awe-inspiring First Symphony. With music that begins as a shimmer in the strings and ends in one of the most heroic finales ever written, Mahler’s First is one of history’s most breathtaking works.

For more information, including full program notes, visit the San Francisco Symphony’s digital program book platform at sfsymphony.encoreplus.app or text “SFS Concert” to 55741.

Concert Extras

Pre-Concert Talk: Join us for an informative “Inside Music” talk from the stage with John Platoff. Free to all ticketholders, these talks begin one hour before the January 27-29 performances. Doors open 15 minutes before.

AT A GLANCE

The First Piano Concerto of Franz Liszt was composed, and re-composed, and revised again and again over a quarter of a century. Liszt could turn out facile piano solos at the drop of a hat, but he tended to anguish over works that he envisioned more for posterity, works in the “big” forms of the symphony or the concerto, for example. A single theme dominates the entire First Piano Concerto. As the piece progresses, the melody undergoes all manner of transformations. The soloist’s part qualifies as a catalogue of the possibilities available to the ultra-virtuosic pianist (a species epitomized by Liszt): blazing octaves, intricate ornamental figurations, chords running up and down the entire keyboard, and many other things that can keep pianists awake at night.

Once, contemplating the lack of understanding with which his First Symphony met at most of its early performances, Gustav Mahler lamented that while Ludwig van Beethoven had been able to start as a sort of modified Franz Joseph Haydn and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, and Richard Wagner had begun as an evolution of Carl Maria von Weber and Giacomo Meyerbeer, he had the misfortune to be Gustav Mahler from the outset. He composed this symphony in high hopes of being understood. No other piece of Mahler’s has so complicated a history and about no other did he change his mind so often and over so long a period. He changed the total concept by canceling a whole movement, he made striking alterations in compositional and orchestral detail, and for some time he was unsure whether he was offering a symphonic poem, a program symphony, or just a symphony.

After notes by James M. Keller and Michael Steinberg

For more information, including full program notes, visit the San Francisco Symphony’s digital program book platform at sfsymphony.encoreplus.app or text “SFS Concert” to 55741.

Artists

Michael Tilson Thomas

Conductor

Yuja Wang

Piano

San Francisco Symphony

Program

Franz Liszt

Piano Concerto No. 1

Gustav Mahler

Symphony No. 1

THE JANUARY 28 PERFORMANCE CONDUCTED BY MUSIC DIRECTOR LAUREATE MICHAEL TILSON THOMAS IS UNDERWRITTEN BY MARCIA AND JOHN GOLDMAN IN HONOR AND MEMORY OF PAST SAN FRANCISCO SYMPHONY PRESIDENT NANCY HELLMAN BECHTLE.

MTT: YUJA WANG & MAHLER 1

Conductor

Michael Tilson Thomas is the Music Director Laureate of the San Francisco Symphony, conductor laureate of the London Symphony Orchestra, and cofounder and artistic director laureate of the New World Symphony. He is a 12-time Grammy Award winner and has conducted the major orchestras of Europe and the United States.

Born in Los Angeles, he studied conducting and composition with Ingolf Dahl at the University of Southern California and as a young musician worked with artists including Igor Stravinsky and Aaron Copland. In his mid-20s, he became assistant conductor—and later principal guest conductor—of the Boston Symphony. He subsequently served as music director of the Buffalo Philharmonic, principal guest conductor of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and principal conductor of the London Symphony.

In 1987 he cofounded the New World Symphony, a postgraduate orchestral academy in Miami Beach dedicated to preparing young musicians of diverse backgrounds for leadership roles in classical music. He has worked with more than 1,200 NWS fellows, many of whom have gone on to major musical careers.

MTT became Music Director of the San Francisco Symphony in 1995, ushering in a period of significant growht and heightened international recognition for the orchestra. He led the Symphony in championing contemporary and American composers alongside classical masters, and as Music Director Laureate, he has returned to conduct the orchestra each season.

His discography includes more than 120 recordings, and his television work includes series for the BBC and PBS, the New York Philharmonic’s Young People’s Concerts, and numerous televised performances. “Michael Tilson Thomas: Where Now Is” aired on PBS’s American Masters series in fall 2020.

Throughout his career, he has been an active composer, with major works including From the Diary of Anne Frank, premiered with narrator Audrey Hepburn, and Meditations on Rilke. Both appear on SFS Media’s Grammy Award-winning recording of his music. In 2023, Yuja Wang released a recording on Deutsche Grammophon which included his You Come Here Often?
He is an Officier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres of France, a member of the American Academies of Arts and Sciences and Arts and Letters, a National Medal of Arts recipient, and a 2019 Kennedy Center honoree.

Three major recording projects were released in 2024 in celebration of his 80th birthday: Grace: The Music of Michael Tilson Thomas on Pentatone; The Complete Columbia, CBS, and RCA Recordings on Sony Classical; and Complete Deutsche Grammophon & Argo Recordings on DG Eloquence.