Tucson Symphony's new season to feature violin great Perlman

Violin great Itzhak Perlman will make his first appearance in 11 years with the Tucson Symphony Orchestra when he comes here next season to perform iconic violin solos from the movies.

The orchestra also is bringing one of the most popular animated musicals to the stage when it performs “Frozen in Concert” in early December, one of two so-called cineconcerts on the 2024-25 TSO “Discover the Mix” season.

Music Director José Luis Gomez unveiled the upcoming season, the orchestra’s 96th, to longtime subscribers late last week.

Works by living composers are on the same program as warhorses, those works that have been part of the repertoire for hundreds of years and on the music stands for the TSO throughout its history.

“The idea is that everybody who goes to any program will go, ‘Oh wow, I know this, but I didn’t know this and I didn’t know that,’” Gomez said of the season, his ninth since being named music director in 2016.

The season opens Sept. 27 with pianist David Fray playing Mozart’s popular Piano Concerto No. 21 on a program bookended by Grammy-nominated acoustic and electro-acoustic composer Anna Clyne’s “The Midnight Hour” and Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 6.

In January, mezzo-soprano Sasha Cooke will be the guest soloist for Mahler’s Symphony No. 3 before returning the following weekend to perform Mahler’s song cycle Rückert-Lieder on a program that features the world premiere of Chelsea Komschlies’ new work co-commissioned by the orchestra and “Ballade” from the early 20th-century British composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, dubbed by white American critics in the early 1900s as the “African Mahler.”

The Komschlies piece is one of three new works the TSO co-commissioned for the 2024-25 season. In February, we will hear a new work by Raven Chacon, whose Pulitzer Prize-winning “Voiceless Mass” was a cornerstone of True Concord Voices & Orchestra’s season-opening “Songs of America” concert last October. In March 2025, we hear from Xavier Muzik, winner of the 2024 Emerging Black Composers Project Prize that spotlights early-career Black-American composers, whose new work was a co-commission through the American Composers Orchestra.

Throughout the season, Gomez pairs old faves with new works, like slipping in New York composer Jessie Montgomery’s 2022 piece “Divided” for solo cello and string orchestra into the December Classics concert of works by Mozart, Haydn and Brahms. The soloist will be Cuban-American cellist Tommy Mesa, the TSO’s 2024-25 artist in residence, who made his Tucson debut last summer with the St. Andrew’s Bach Society.

Also in March 2025, Missy Mazzoli’s “These Worlds In Us” is on a program with works by Chopin and Prokofiev; the Grammy-nominated Mazzoli is a favorite composer of Kronos Quartet.

“You’re going to discover new music and you’re going to discover composers that probably you are used to but you haven’t heard for sometime,” Gomez said.

One of those works we’ll rediscover is Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra, which the TSO hasn’t performed in a number of years. The orchestra had it on its 2020-21 season but put it off in light of the pandemic.

The lineup also includes Beethoven’s resounding Fifth Symphony in November, which Gomez did with the TSO in his third full season, and Carl Orff’s choral masterpiece “Carmina Burana” in April 2025, featuring a trio of guest soloists and the TSO Chorus under the direction of Marcela Molina. This will mark the first time the TSO has done the work, which requires a full orchestra and gigantic chorus, since 2016.

That concert also features Mexican composer Gabriela Ortiz‘s “Kauyumari” and the late Tucson composer and University of Arizona professor Robert Muczynski’s “Symphonic Memoir,” composed for the TSO in 1979.

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“It is part of this project that I really have close in my heart of bringing back the music of Robert Muczynski, the composer who was so importantly linked to Tucson,” Gomez said.

Guest artists include the Three Mexican Tenors, violinist Kerson Leong and Tucson guzheng player Jing Xia in November; the return of violinist Paul Huang in February; and pianist Gabriela Martinez in March 2025.

Jing Xia joins guest Seattle Symphony associate conductor Sunny Xia to perform Tan Dun’s Concert for Guzheng and Strings in what will be a first for the TSO, although we have seen the guzheng in concerts with Arizona Friends of Chamber Music and St. Andrew’s Bach Society.

In addition to Sunny Xia, guest conductors include Christian Vásquez, Nicholas Hersh, Francesco Lecce-Chong and Daniela Candillari.

Evan Roider will guest conduct the cineconcerts “Frozen in Concert” in December and “Star Wars: The Force Awakens Live in Concert” in May 2025. In February, Jeff Tyzik will conduct “Symphonic Sci-Fi,” a concert of works from blockbuster films including “Star Wars,” “Star Trek,” “Jurassic Park,” “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” “E.T.” and more from iconic composers John Williams, Jerry Goldsmith, Alexander Courage, Richard Strauss and Arthur Bliss.

And then there’s one of Gomez’s highlights: Conducting the orchestra with Perlman, who last joined the TSO in 2014.

“This is like getting a chance to touch a legend. So many of the amazing traditions of great artists and violinists, he has met everyone. So having him in the same stage is kind of intimidating a little bit. It’s like one of those Goliaths of the violin. So we are excited to play with him.”

Perlman’s Jan. 16, 2025, concert “An Evening at the Movies” includes works he performed for films and his connection to John Williams, including the melody from “Schindler’s List.”

“This is an incredible opportunity for everyone to experience an artist of that caliber,” he said.

The TSO also will continue its ¡Celebración Latina! series, concerts that shine a light on Tucson’s Hispanic culture that Gomez introduced in the 2022-23 season. Six of the orchestra’s concerts next year are part of that initiative.

Season tickets are on sale now, and subscribers can choose from a number of options that range from the full season of concerts to a tasting menu where subscribers can select four or more Classics or three to four Masterworks or go a la carte and create their own subscriptions. Those who subscribe by April 17 will get first pick of the Perlman tickets, which don’t go on sale to the public until October. For details, visit tucsonsymphony.org.