Sunday, October 5, 2025
Tuesday, October 7, 2025

Welcome to the hundred first season of the Portland Symphony Orchestra! If you were here last season, you heard spectacular collaborations with Yo-Yo Ma, Opera Maine for La bohème, and ChoralArt for Orff’s Carmina Burana. This season brings the orchestra itself into focus in great works including Holst’s The Planets, Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade, Brahms’ Symphony No. 1 and Double Concerto, Mozart’s Jupiter Symphony and Mahler’s towering Symphony No. 6. Add a spate of new works, Bach’s must-hear B-Minor Mass and an array of smaller treasures, and you have so much to look forward to! Your hometown orchestra is featured, along with exciting new and returning soloists.

For these season-opening concerts, Music Director Eckart Preu has chosen 2 works that are central to the symphonic repertoire: Tchaikovsky’s beloved violin concerto and Brahms’ Symphony No. 1. Each piece cost its creator much anguish. Tchaikovsky, who almost always struggled with a deeply unfavorable view of his own work, was devastated when the dedicatee of this concerto, Leopold Auer, refused to perform it. Further, when it was finally performed by another violinist, reviews were lukewarm, seeming to confirm the composer’s misgivings. The luxury of hindsight shows us that it has become perennially popular with soloists and audiences everywhere in the intervening 150 years.

Brahms hesitated for years before writing this symphony, fearing comparison with Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9. Here, too, his fears were unfounded. This piece was recognized as superb at its première, and has never left the repertoire of serious orchestras everywhere. For the connoisseur, there are niceties of form and construction aplenty; for the casual listener there are great melodies, towering climaxes, and one of the most stirring finales in the whole repertoire. Listen for important solos for violin and horn and some telling moments for oboe, as well.

These concerts bring the welcome Portland debut of American violinist Randall Goosby, whose remarkable biography can be found at https://randallgoosby.com/

– Martin Webster