If you could hear silence, how would it sound? Maybe something like the massive stillness that opens Mahler’s First Symphony: the starting point for a young artist’s journey to the heart of absolute tragedy and glorious triumph. It’s one of those pieces that simply has to be experienced live, and as part of our ongoing ‘Composer Roots’ project, we’ll uncover its origins in Jewish folk music with the klezmer band She’Koyokh. To open, an effervescent Broadway overture by Mahler’s great champion Leonard Bernstein and a magnificent rarity by a late-romantic master who shared Bernstein and Mahler’s Jewish heritage. In Ernest Bloch’s ‘Schelomo’, the solo cello is King Solomon, and its voice is his Song – by turns passionate, forthright, and uninhibitedly sensuous.