Andris Nelsons returns to Symphony Hall to conduct a series of concerts with the Boston Symphony Orchestra this autumn season. Beginning on September 29, 30, & October 1, Nelsons leads the BSO in Haydn’s 100th Symphony, and electrifying soloist Yuja Wang takes the stage for not one, but both of Shostakovich’s piano concertos, written 24 years apart.

On October 6, 7 & 8, Nelsons leads two works new to the BSO repertoire: the BSO-commissioned Starling Variations by American composer Elizabeth Ogonek and Dmitri Shostakovich’s rarely heard 1930 Symphony No. 3 for chorus and orchestra, an early, jingoistic hymn to the Soviet experiment, continuing Nelsons’ and the BSO’s multi-season survey of the composer’s complete symphonies. The Tanglewood Festival Chorus also joins the BSO for Leonard Bernstein’s Chichester Psalms, featuring Linus Schafer-Goulthorpe, boy soprano, as soloist, and violinist Jennifer Koh makes her Boston Symphony Orchestra debut as soloist in Bernstein’s Serenade.

Following, Nelsons leads Mahler’s intensely emotional Symphony No. 6, on October 20, 21, & 22. Arguably Mahler’s most heartfelt symphonic statement, the sixth symphony features three powerful and ominous hammer blows in its finale, which evidently represented for Mahler „three blows of fate.“

On October 27, 28, 29 & 30, Nelsons conducts Beethoven and Shostakovich with renowned pianist Mitsuko Uchida. These performances mark the first concert of a multi-year collaboration in Ludwig van Beethoven’s five piano concertos, beginning with his monumental Emperor. Also on the program is Shostakovich’s powerful and outwardly triumphant Fifth Symphony.

His final concert with the BSO will take place on November 3 with a program featuring Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Caroline Shaw, who wrote her Bach-inspired Punctum originally for string quartet, but the BSO-commissioned orchestral version was premiered in summer 2022. Wolfgang Mozart’s riveting No. 40 in G minor, the second of his final trilogy of symphonies, composed in 1788, is for many his most familiar symphony. Richard Strauss’ amazingly vivid Alpine Symphony depicts the picturesque ascent and descent of a Bavarian mountain.