Sarasota Orchestra: Masterworks — Mahler Symphony No. 5
Some music arrives like weather: first a distant pressure, then a sudden change in the air.
By Edit Sarasota Staff
Some music arrives like weather: first a distant pressure, then a sudden change in the air. Mahler’s Symphony No. 5 is that kind of experience. It begins with a trumpet call that feels ceremonial and ominous, moves through grief, fury, tenderness, and bewilderment, and ends in a burst of hard-won triumph. When Sarasota Orchestra takes on this monumental score, the evening becomes more than a concert. It becomes a test of what a full orchestra, and a full room, can hold.
Music Director Bramwell Tovey will lead the orchestra through Mahler’s sprawling, emotionally volatile Fifth Symphony, a work whose five movements seem to argue with one another before arriving at a precarious sense of joy. Its famous Adagietto—often heard in isolation, where it can seem almost suspended in amber—takes on a different meaning within the symphony’s larger architecture. Here, its hushed strings and harp are not simply a love song, but a moment of stillness inside a work preoccupied with mortality, struggle, and renewal.
The program opens with Richard Strauss’s Don Juan, another orchestral showpiece built around a larger-than-life character. Its gleaming brass, restless strings, and surging momentum make an immediate introduction to the scale and ambition of the evening. Strauss’s seductive confidence and Mahler’s more searching emotional landscape should make for a vivid pairing: two composers at the edge of the Romantic tradition, each asking how much drama an orchestra can carry.
For Sarasota, programs of this breadth are part of the orchestra’s larger role in the region’s cultural life. The Sarasota Orchestra is not merely a presenter of concerts but a musical gathering place, connecting longtime classical listeners with curious newcomers and giving the community the chance to hear ambitious repertoire performed live. In the Van Wezel, with its broad bayfront setting and unmistakable purple exterior, that communal act has a particularly local character: the room becomes a shared vessel for music that was written to overwhelm ordinary scale.
The Sarasota Orchestra: Masterworks program featuring Mahler’s Symphony No. 5, preceded by Strauss’s Don Juan, takes place Saturday, August 15, 2026, at Van Wezel Performing Arts Hall, 777 N Tamiami Trail, Sarasota. Under Tovey’s direction, the evening offers the rare pleasure of hearing a major symphonic statement unfold in real time—its silences, shocks, and final exhilaration experienced alongside an audience gathered at the water’s edge.