MTT’s Street Song and Winter Daydreams

Teddy Abrams, conductor
Parker Van Ostrand, piano
San Diego Symphony Orchestra

MICHAEL TILSON THOMAS: Street Song for Symphonic Brass
RACHMANINOFF: Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, Op. 43
TCHAIKOVSKY: Symphony No. 1 in G minor, Op. 13, Winter Daydreams

Due to illness, Michael Tilson Thomas regrettably has withdrawn from his performances with the San Diego Symphony on February 15 and 16.

Conducting the program conceived by Michael Tilson Thomas will be Teddy Abrams, Music Director of the Louisville Orchestra and formerly a Conducting Fellow and Assistant Conductor under Michael Tilson Thomas at the New World Symphony from 2008-2011.

The concert opens with Michael Tilson Thomas' 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 Abrams 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!