Overview

Dutch conductor Jaap van Zweden and American pianist Emanuel Ax return to the San Francisco Symphony for a stellar program featuring two Austrian giants. The passionate, far-reaching C-major Piano Concerto, K.503 is now recognized as one of Mozart’s finest—and most difficult—works in the genre. Olivier Messiaen called the brief third theme of the third movement the most beautiful sequence of bars that Mozart ever wrote. It wasn’t until his Seventh Symphony that Bruckner, age 60, enjoyed any popular success as a composer. The Seventh Symphony features a contrabass tuba and, for the first time outside The Ring cycle, four Wagner tubas. It’s a fitting tribute to Wagner, whom Bruckner memorialized in the symphony’s elegiac coda—calling it “funeral music for the Master.”