Pasadena Symphony Launches 2024-25 Season with Mahler’s monumental “Titan” Symphony No. 1 at Ambassador Auditorium

Pasadena Symphony launches its 2024-25 season and a new era under Music Director Brett Mitchell – only the sixth music director to lead the orchestra since it was founded in 1928 – with a program filled with symbolism on Saturday, October 26, 2024, at 2 pm and 8 pm, at Pasadena’s Ambassador Auditorium. Mitchell conducts Mahler’s Symphony No. 1, “Titan,” Korgold’s Violin Concerto with renowned violinist Akiko Suwanai, winner of the International Tchaikovsky Competition, and New Beginnings by Peter Boyer. The monumental program, deeply rooted in Pasadena, simultaneously looks both forward and back while also reflecting the orchestra members’ strong ties to the film and television recording industry. This marks the acclaimed orchestra’s 97th season.

Mitchell commences his tenure with New Beginnings, a dazzlingly celebratory fanfare by Boyer, a prolific film score orchestrator and GRAMMY-nominated composer based in Altadena who served as Pasadena Symphony’s 2012-13 Composer in Residence and has contributed orchestrations to more than 35 film scores. One of the composer’s earliest orchestral commissions, New Beginnings has been heard from Carnegie Hall to the Kansas prairie and adapted for background music on CBS This Morning. It has been hailed as “a well-crafted piece that mixes blazing fanfare-like material with a sweet secondary tune that could have come from the pen of Aaron Copland” (The Providence Journal).

Also embracing the orchestra’s cinematic connections and musical virtuosity, Suwanai, hailed for her “round, beautiful sound and perfect technique” (Opus Magazine), performs the Violin Concerto by Korngold, a masterful composer who brilliantly straddled both Hollywood and the rigorous Viennese Classical musical tradition from which he emerged. Referred to as a “Hollywood Concerto,” the beloved Violin Concerto integrates themes from films the composer scored during the Golden Age of cinema. It offers a subtle nod to the numerous Pasadena Symphony artists past and present whose work in the film recording industry spans the decades. In 2019, Mitchell conducted the work to great critical acclaim with Suwanai and the Orquesta Sinfónica del Principado de Asturias in Spain.

Mitchell caps his first program as music director of the Pasadena Symphony with Mahler’s landmark Symphony No. 1, “Titan,” a staggering work of tremendous emotional depth for massive forces. The symphonic poem melds traditional and modernist musical ideas while shifting moods from joy and exuberance to introspection and melancholy. NPR states, “It's hard to resist the pull of a piece that begins like Mahler's First: The strings play a single note spread out over seven octaves."

Pre-Concert Talk, Tickets, and Information

Single tickets ($49-$142) are available now. Tickets include admission to a pre-concert conversation held one hour prior to the concert hosted by KUSC Classical California’s Brian Lauritzen, who will interview Brett Mitchell, offering a deep and entertaining dive into the program. For tickets and information, visit pasadenasymphony-pops.org or call the box office at (626) 793-7172