MTT’s Street Songs And Winter Daydreams by Thomas, M. T., Vasilyevich Rachmaninoff, Tchaikovsky, P. I., Fra (2025/2025), Dirigent Michael Tilson Thomas, Jacobs Music Center, San Diego, United States

Beloved American conductor and composer Michael Tilson Thomas makes his SDSO debut in this special program that opens with his own Street Song for Symphonic Brass, a work reflecting Tilson Thomas’s love for all kinds of popular and street music of the past and especially music connected with his grandparents, the Yiddish theatre stars Boris and Bessie Tomashefsky. Rising star pianist Parker van Ostrand will join Tilson Thomas and the Symphony for Rachmaninoff’s demanding Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, based on Paganini’s most famous and familiar ear-worm, his 24th Caprice for solo violin. The program ends with Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 1, the Russian composer’s first large-scale orchestral work. Conceived and written when the composer was still in his mid-twenties, this symphony makes delightful use of motifs and phrases derived from Russian village-songs; in the last movement, one whole folk-melody, originally a wedding song for dancing, anticipating the coming of Spring and the resurgence of new young life: In a dark wood, in the forest, I’ll go ploughing, my Paulina! I’ll sow flax-seeds, I’ll sow green ones!