Named the 2025 Classical Woman of the Year by NPR’s Performance Today, Grammy Award-winning composer and violinist Jessie Montgomery wrote her cello concerto for the South African cellist Abel Selaocoe. In the composer’s words, it’s “very sentimental because it’s very much about mothers and about care. It’s a series of lullabies and songs that are specifically from mothers to children, or love songs of some kind. So those sentiments of love and adoration and magnetism, magnitude, those things are all wonderful inspirations.”

“It came gushing out like a mountain torrent,” Mahler said of his First Symphony. Written for a huge orchestra and full of youthful Romanticism, the work follows the journey of Mahler’s “hero” through episodes of optimism, struggle, death, and ultimately triumph.

Be inspired by two works which capture both the intimacy and drama of the human experience!