Transcendence

After nearly two decades at the helm of Woolsey Hall, Maestro William Boughton conducts his final concert as the Music Director of the Yale Symphony Orchestra. John Mauceri, the legendary former Music Director of the Orchestra who served from 1968-1973, returns to conduct “What Love Tells Me” from Mahler’s Third Symphony — a staggering and profound affirmation of human life, “among the most sublime in all symphonic literature.” Carlos Simon’s “Holy Dance” opens the program with its evocation of “joyous dancing, spontaneous shouting, and soulful singing” found in the worship services of predominantly Black churches. Former Yale Symphony Orchestra cellist Henry Shapard returns as the soloist in Elgar’s rhapsodic and haunting Cello Concerto, written as a response to the devastation of World War I. Maestro Boughton concludes the season and his tenure as Music Director of the Orchestra with Holst’s The Planets, the interstellar masterpiece that finds its legacy in the music of countless sci-film films and its enthrallment of generations of listeners with its evocation of the celestial bodies: cosmic and dramatic in scale, transcendent and picturesque in its portrayal of the beyond.

Carlos Simon - "Holy Dance" from Four Black American Dances

Sir Edward Elgar - Cello Concerto

Gustav Mahler - Symphony No. 3, Finale

Gustav Holst - The Planets

Host or Publisher Yale Symphony Orchestra