Gandolfi // Doubles (world premiere)
Brahms // Double Concerto
Hikaru Yonezaki, violin | Leland Ko, cello
Mahler // Symphony No. 1

For its final concert the orchestra has commissioned a new work from one of today’s leading composers, Michael Gandolfi, whose music Mr. Zander has championed in the past.  Taking his cue from the Brahms Double Concerto, which also appears on this program, Mr. Gandolfi has entitled his work Doubles, and has promised that it will feature “two-ness” of several sorts.  

Regular attendees will have grown familiar to seeing Hikaru Yonezaki and Leland Ko sitting at the first stand of the violins and the cellos respectively.  This concert gives them the opportunity to step forward and shine in the spotlight, playing Brahms’s great Double Concerto.  This formidable concerto, the composer’s last, finds Brahms in a mood that is deeply expressive, but also austere. It is a piece that demands the greatest maturity from its performers, which is exactly what it is going to receive from these two amazing young artists.

Finally, the season ends with the composer who is most familiar to the orchestra and to its conductor.  Mahler's First Symphony tells the story of its hero’s (i.e., Mahler’s) absorption with nature, his youthful adventures, trials, and final triumph. This symphony is arguably the most breathtakingly original first symphony ever composed, from its magically evocative description of dawn at the opening to the overwhelmingly thrilling climax of its vast Finale.  It will be the triumphant capstone to another enormously ambitious season of the phenomenal Boston Philharmonic Youth Orchestra.