San Francisco Symphony: Jaap van Zweden & Emanuel Ax

Dutch conductor Jaap van Zweden — former music director of the New York Philharmonic, now leading the Seoul Philharmonic and incoming at the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France — brings heavyweight credentials to a program built around two Austrian masterworks.

The first half features Emanuel Ax performing Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 25 in C major, K.503 — widely considered one of the most ambitious and difficult works in the concerto repertoire. It's a piece that took decades to get its due. Olivier Messiaen once called the brief third theme of its final movement "the most beautiful sequence of bars that Mozart ever wrote." Ax, who won the first Arthur Rubinstein International Piano Competition in 1974, is one of the few pianists alive who can make this concerto feel both monumental and intimate.

The second half is Bruckner's Symphony No. 7 — the piece that finally gave the composer popular success at age 60. It's a massive, cathedral-scale work scored for four Wagner tubas (the first time they'd been used outside The Ring cycle) and contrabass tuba. In Davies Hall's acoustics, the brass chorales in the slow movement hit differently.

A preconcert talk runs from the stage one hour before showtime if you want the full context.