Michael Tilson Thomas Returns
Friday, March 10 8:00 PM
Saturday, March 11 8:00 PM
Sunday, March 12 2:00 PM
Michael Tilson Thomas Conductor
Leonidas Kavakos Violin
Seeger Andante for Strings
Berg Violin Concerto
Beethoven Symphony No. 3 ("Eroica")
“At the end of his life when asked which was his favorite work, [Beethoven] unhesitatingly said, the ‘Eroica,’” says Michael Tilson Thomas. “It’s a real epic for orchestra, but it’s also a vast and contradictory masterpiece.” The charismatic conductor returns to lead Beethoven’s landmark—and truly heroic—Symphony No. 3. Greek violinist Leonidas Kavakos left Verizon Hall audiences rapturous after his 2015 performance of the Sibelius Concerto. He also returns, applying his “off the charts” technique (The Philadelphia Inquirer) to another early-20th-century masterpiece, Berg’s Violin Concerto. The daring American composer Ruth Crawford Seeger dropped in—unannounced—on Berg while in Vienna on a Guggenheim Fellowship. It was shortly after that meeting—and before her immersion in the folk movement that would make her stepson Pete the famous one in the family—that she was composing the experimental music from which her Andante for Strings is plucked. Her concise and compact piece opens these enthralling concerts.