Hailed by Singapore’s Straits Times as the “Malaysian Mozart,” and by The New York Times for his “sheer incisiveness [and] power," pianist, composer, and conductor Tengku Irfan joins Music Director Robert Spano for the world premiere of Canadian composer Matthew Ricketts’s Piano Concerto. Ricketts’s After Nine: A Fantasia on Mahler was praised by New York Classical Review as “attractive, evocative, and subtle.”

The program concludes with Brahms’s turbulent and triumphant First Symphony. Profoundly aware of Beethoven’s shadow, Brahms took nearly twenty years to complete the work, explaining, “You can’t have any idea what it’s like always to hear such a giant marching behind you.” When the similarity of the last movement’s theme to Beethoven’s Ode to Joy was noted, Brahms remarked, “Any ass can see that.”