Want to go beyond the concert programme in our 2025–26 Season? Accompanying our series with Music Director Vasily Petrenko at Southbank Centre and the Royal Albert Hall, our #MoreMusic playlists help you discover music with pieces that defined the lives and journeys of the composers we feature, as well as historical recordings and works by their contemporaries.
Mahler x Bernstein
The opening concert of our 2025–26 Season sees the first instance of our three performances of Mahler's symphonies this season. Mahler's Symphony No.1, 'Titan', is a voyage through life and death, birdsong and fanfares, funeral marches and Viennese waltzes, written by a composer who would bring the syphonic form to its pinnacle in the early twentieth century, and who lived out his last years in the United States. Few other American musicians are as instantly recognisable as Leonard Bernstein in style, who was a lifelong champion and populariser of Mahler, and whose Chichester Psalms give choirs the challenge of singing psalms in the original Hebrew. Discover more music by these composers below.
Wagner’s opera Lohengrin: listen to the Prelude to Act I for the parallels with (perhaps even plagiarism of) Puccini’s Prelude sinfonico.
Bernstein’s Symphony No.3, ‘Kaddish’, completed just two years before the Chichester Psalms, is a lavish choral symphony that is also centred around Hebrew texts.
Mahler’s song cycle, Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen (Songs of a Wayfarer), whose material weaves its way through his First Symphony
Programme notes and listening recommendations by Jo Kirkbride, 2025
Find #MoreMusic from our 2024–25 Lights in the Dark series with Vasily Petrenko: