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Music Director Michael Tilson Thomas and the San Francisco Symphony release a new single from their Digital Concert Series which celebrates MTT's 25th and final season as Music Director, including live concert recordings from 2019–20 season concerts featuring composers that MTT and the SFS have championed throughout their decades together. "Benvenuto Cellini's Overture has never been long absent from concert halls. The quick music we hear first was composed especially for the Overture. The two slow themes are previews of the opera itself, the solemn music beginning with plucked cellos and basses being associated with Cellini's patron, Pope Clement VII, the lovely woodwind melody being Harlequin's plaintive air in the carnival scene. The decisive and impetuous allegro, of which we have had just a hint, then takes over, introducing in its course one of Berlioz's most magnificently sweeping and inspired melodies. At the end, the Pope's theme in slow notes bestrides the scurrying string figurations and the pounding kettledrum rhythms. Not even the conductor Habeneck (who led the premiere) is likely to have missed this; Berlioz does, however, proudly mark it in the score as "Thème de l'adagio réuni au second thème de l'allegro." - Michael Steinberg (Music Critic/Author)