The MSO’s own principal cellist Susan Babini performs an unforgettable concerto by Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Aaron Jay Kernis, whose expansive and haunting solo cello concerto Colored Field was inspired by a visit to a former WWII concentration camp. Later, Music Director Ken-David Masur conducts Brahms’ First Symphony, whose brilliance helped the composer step out of Beethoven’s shadow; critic Eduard Hanslick said of Brahms’s First that “…even the layman will immediately recognize it as one of the most distinctive and magnificent works of the symphonic literature.”