The honeymoon that began when Michael Tilson Thomas became the San Francisco Symphony’s music director in 1995 has lost none of its passion as the ensemble prepares to celebrate its centenary next year. LUCERNE FESTIVAL audiences can experience what all the excitement is about when they showcase their diverse repertoire in three programs this summer.

In 2001, Michael Tilson Thomas (“MTT”) and the San Francisco Symphony launched their acclaimed Mahler cycle. The project—including all the symphonies and song cycles—has proved to be an artistic milestone for the orchestra, winning a total of seven Grammy Awards, including three this year alone for their account of the Eighth Symphony and Adagio from the Tenth.  The San Francisco Symphony is the first U.S. orchestra to form its own label for the Mahler project, which has been recorded from live in-house performances at the Symphony’s home concert hall.

“Mahler was like a cinematographer in music,” observes MTT, “creating enormous soundscapes that include everything we know of life.”  Reviewing the orchestra’s release of the Fifth Symphony, the “London Times” observed that “some American orchestral outfits and conductors offer nothing but hard technique and gloss paint; this orchestra plays with hearts plus minds… Above all, the players, like Tilson Thomas, understand Mahler’s language.” For their first program, on September 11, these world-class American Mahlerians will perform the Fifth, the work Mahler was composing during the period when he met and married his wife Alma. Sharing that program is the “Organ Symphony,” an excitingly early and rebellious piece by another of MTT’s specialties—a composer he knew in person—Aaron Copland.

According to MTT, Mahler is “the missing link” between the Vienna of Schubert and Beethoven and the hothouse, modernist city of Alban Berg a century later. Their second concert, on September 12, offers an example of the imaginatively thematic programming for which the San Francisco Symphony and MTT have developed a reputation. The most famous of all “Fifths”—that of Beethoven—will be set alongside another work deeply imbued with a sense of fatality, the Violin Concerto that Alban Berg composed as a requiem “to the memory of an angel” upon the premature death of Manon Gropius (daughter of Mahler’s widow, Alma). The “curtain-raiser” is Wagner’s “Flying Dutchman” Overture, in which the prospect of redemption through love at last frees the tormented sailor from his tragic curse.

MTT and his musicians are also prized for their sense of color rendered with precision—a trademark that the conductor developed in part from his association with the elder Stravinsky during his Los Angeles years. These qualities will enhance their final program, on September 13, featuring works by Berlioz and Ravel that pay poetic homage to Eros.