Jaap van Zweden & Emanuel Ax

Dutch conductor Jaap van Zweden and American pianist Emanuel Ax return to the San Francisco Symphony for a stellar program featuring two Austrian giants. The passionate, far-reaching C-major Piano Concerto, K.503 is now recognized as one of Mozart's finest--and most difficult--works in the genre. Olivier Messiaen called the brief third theme of the third movement the most beautiful sequence of bars that Mozart ever wrote. It wasn't until his Seventh Symphony that Bruckner, age 60, enjoyed any popular success as a composer. The Seventh Symphony features a contrabass tuba and, for the first time outside The Ring cycle, four Wagner tubas. It's a fitting tribute to Wagner, whom Bruckner memorialized in the symphony's elegiac coda--calling it "funeral music for the Master."


Artists

Jaap van Zweden
Conductor

Emanuel Ax
Piano

San Francisco Symphony


Program

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Piano Concerto No. 25 in C major, K.503

Anton Bruckner
Symphony No. 7