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South Korean conductor Eun Sun Kim makes her BSO debut with a trio of pieces exploring innovation within tradition. Star pianist Inon Barnatan returns to Symphony Hall to take on one of Bartók’s final works, the Third Piano Concerto, a love letter to his wife and his home country. While living in poverty in New York having fled the onslaught of the Nazis into Hungary, Bartók’s creativity had stalled out, and his body was failing from a long illness. The concerto — not quite finished when he passed — is a more gentle and accessibly poetic work than his previous concerti, a summation of where Bartók’s style left him at the end of his life.

Ray Chen plays Tchaikovsky’s beloved Violin Concerto, the first work the composer completed after his separation from his disastrous marriage and a piece he almost dedicated to his student – and likely lover and inspiration, Iosif Kotek. 120 years later, Michael Tilson Thomas lovingly set three of Walt Whitman poems about longing and belonging for baritone and orchestra. Leonard Bernstein’s star-crossed lovers close the program in an iconic love letter to New York and love itself.

Considered one of the most preeminent jazz artists of all time, and one of the most influential musical artists of any genre, John Coltrane has truly played a part in shaping the music of today. Coltrane: Legacy for Orchestra is a new live concert experience re-framing some of John Coltrane’s most popular and influential works with lush orchestrations, accompanied by exclusive and recently-exhibited personal photographs of John Coltrane.

The first in our series looking at the music and times of Dmitri Shostakovich and how the composer folded messages of revolution and resistance into his music during a politically turbulent time. Written more than 50 years after the Russian Revolution and during another point of political and historical upheaval, Shostakovich’s Eleventh Symphony is a revisitation of the events of Bloody Sunday, integrating Russian folk and revolutionary songs. The final movement is simultaneously a rallying cry and a warning to future tyrants.

A part of our series looking at the music and times of Dmitri Shostakovich and how the composer folded messages of revolution and resistance into his music during a politically turbulent time. Yo-Yo Ma brings the specter of resistance to the stage. Shostakovich’s Cello Concerto is a prime example of the composer using music to protest an authoritarian regime; the cello stands defiant against the orchestra, often playing out its own theme not reflected in the ensemble, until it disseminates into a wild cadenza and is whisked away into a sudden abrupt end.

Mitsuki Uchida has, from an early age, been considered a standout interpreter of Beethoven. This is considered Beethoven’s first piano concerto wherein he broke away from the more traditional format prescribed by Mozart (an orchestral introduction with a dramatic solo entrance) and created his own way forward, letting the instrument speak for itself — intimately and delicately so — and leading the way for the rest of the ensemble. Shostakovich’s Fifteenth Symphony is his last symphony and is full of quotations, codes, clues, and ambiguity. This is an experience defying description which invites the listener to create their own personal interpretation.

The incomparable Mitsuko Uchida—one of the most intuitive Beethoven interpreters of our time—concludes a historic, three-year Perspectives series at Carnegie Hall with the sublime Piano Concerto No. 4, performing as soloist alongside Andris Nelsons and the Boston Symphony Orchestra (BSO). Music fans will also be eager to hear Nelsons and the BSO perform a symphony by Shostakovich, following their eight-year, wildly acclaimed, and multi-Grammy–winning recording cycle of the composer’s complete symphonies. For this performance, they’ve selected Shostakovich’s final symphony, a subversive work full of quotations and references, animated throughout by its great diversity and sense of momentum.

This program pairs Shostakovich’s introspective, classically elegant Sixth Symphony with Stravinsky’s austerely profound Symphony of Psalms, commissioned by Serge Koussevitzky for the BSO’s 50th anniversary. In fact, Shostakovich so revered Stravinsky’s piece that he made a two-piano arrangement of the score. The BSO commissioned Aleksandra Vrebalov to compose a psalm setting using the same musical forces as Stravinsky’s masterpiece. Originally from the former Yugoslavia and winner of the prestigious 2023 Grawemeyer Award, Vrebalov composes music of deeply spiritual humanism influenced in part by Orthodox chant.

A part of our series looking at the music and times of Dmitri Shostakovich and how the composer folded messages of revolution and resistance into his music during a politically turbulent time. Latvian violinist Baiba Skride brings her signature dulcet tones to Shostakovich’s Violin Concerto No. 1. This work is a deeply personal one, influenced by the composer’s fear of the Soviet censors and actual encounters with restrictive directives from the government. These bitter feelings toward the regime especially color the third and fourth movements. In this way and many others, we see the composer finding ways to stand up to prevailing political winds; for example, the whole piece is shot through with Jewish klezmer influence at a time when antisemitism was on the rise in the USSR.