Overview

Conductor Fabio Luisi and the Symphony perform a pair of unmissable works by two radically different Viennese composers who influenced each other in unexpected ways. Composed during his World War II exile in the United States, Schoenberg’s Piano Concerto is notoriously demanding, but pianist Kirill Gerstein is always making music, never working out a math puzzle. Romantic, sprawling and complex, the Fifth Symphony marked a turning point in Mahler’s career. He wrote the famous fourth movement Adagietto as a love poem for his new bride Alma, but it works in other contexts, too. In 1968 Leonard Bernstein conducted it at the funeral mass for Robert F. Kennedy, and three years later Luigi Visconti used it on the soundtrack of Death in Venice.