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French conductor Nathalie Stutzmann makes her BSO conducting debut with German violinist Veronika Eberle in her Symphony Hall debut in Beethoven’s towering Violin Concerto. Ravel's Alborada del gracioso and Stravinsky’s ballet score The Firebird are both marvels of orchestral brilliance from the 1910s: Ravel’s one of his many Spanish-influenced confections and Stravinsky’s a journey through a Russian folk tale of heroism, magic, and renewal that vaulted the composer to the forefront of modern music.

Herbert Blomstedt, celebrating a seven-decade conducting career, returns to lead the BSO in Franz Schubert's light-hearted, cheerful Symphony No. 6, composed when he was 20 and notable as a satisfyingly classical work preceding his more searching later symphonies. Brahms was strongly influenced by Schubert but more so still by Beethoven, whose symphonic shadow apparently kept Brahms from completing his First Symphony until he was 43 years old. A prominent theme in its finale is a direct nod to Beethoven’s Ninth.

Isabelle Faust and Alan Gilbert return for Stravinsky’s bracing, wry Violin Concerto, a work at the core of his sparkling and witty neoclassical period. Bracketing Stravinsky’s concerto are two Joseph Haydn works from early and late in his symphonic career, during which he largely created the foundations for the 18th-century Viennese Classical era.

Acclaimed Mexican composer Gabriela Ortiz, known for her vibrant instrumental colors and skill with dramatic narrative, wrote her ballet score Revolución diamantina with Mexican writer Cristina Rivera Garza. The piece explores the powerful Mexican feminist “Glitter Revolution” campaign to highlight an epidemic of violence against women. Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky wonderfully depicts love’s passion and an infernal whirlwind in his tone poem Francesca da Rimini, inspired by a historic injustice recounted in Dante’s Inferno. Murdered by her husband, Francesca suffers in the second level of hell for her lustfulness, buffeted by an eternal storm. As a contrast, Alban Gerhardt is soloist in the composer’s charming Variations on a Rococo Theme.

Acclaimed Mexican composer Gabriela Ortiz, known for her vibrant instrumental colors and skill with dramatic narrative, wrote her ballet score Revolución diamantina with Mexican writer Cristina Rivera Garza. The piece explores the powerful Mexican feminist “Glitter Revolution” campaign to highlight an epidemic of violence against women. Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky wonderfully depicts love’s passion and an infernal whirlwind in his tone poem Francesca da Rimini, inspired by a historic injustice recounted in Dante’s Inferno. Murdered by her husband, Francesca suffers in the second level of hell for her lustfulness, buffeted by an eternal storm. As a contrast, Alban Gerhardt is soloist in the composer’s charming Variations on a Rococo Theme.

Dima Slobodeniouk leads three works, all notable for their proximity to wartime. Edward Elgar’s Violin Concerto can be seen in retrospect as an idyllic calm before the storm of World War I. Adolphus Hailstork’s Lachrymosa: 1919 explores the Red Summer of 1919, a deadly backlash against Black American prosperity in the wake of the war. Stravinsky’s Symphony in Three Movements was the composer’s dark reaction to the universal devastation of World War II.

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.