Dvořák Symphony No. 8

Dvořák wrote his Eighth Symphony at his summer home in southern Bohemia, where he hiked, listened to the birds, and felt the sun and wind on his skin. This music revels in the pleasures and mysteries of the natural world, the cycle of life that sustains us. Cellist Pablo Ferrández joins conductor Xian Zhang and the San Francisco Symphony for Tchaikovsky’s Rococo Variations, a poignant evocation of Mozartian order and beauty—a lost world Tchaikovsky longed to inhabit. Composed in 1933, Dances of Galánta rearranges and reinvents the Roma folk music that Kodály first heard in Galánta, the tiny railway town where he spent seven happy years as a child.