The first and final works in this program shows Brahms at his most emotional and at his most apparently serene. The Song of Destiny, for chorus and orchestra, is an impassioned setting of a Hölderlin poem contrasting the pleasures of heaven and the torments of mortal, earthly existence.

Brahms' glorious symphony, on the other hand, has a glowing mellowness that conceals beneath its pastoral surface a tightly-argued masterpiece of symphonic thinking.

John Wegner, one of the great Wagner singers of our day, joins the MSO for THE moving monologue which closes the second opera in Wagner's The Ring of the Nibelung. Angry with his Valkyrie daughter Brünnhilde for disobeying his well, Wotan, King of the gods, puts her to sleep on a rock within a ring of fire, where only the bravest of heroes may awaken her.