Season 1 focuses on Mahler’s Symphony No. 1 in D major (1888), taking listeners back to the work’s origins in the street songs, folk tunes and bugle calls of Mahler’s childhood. Each episode is devoted to a movement of the symphony.

Guests include conductors Kent Nagano and Michael Tilson Thomas; principal musicians of the Boston Symphony, the Philadelphia Orchestra and the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra of Amsterdam; scholars from Columbia University and the University of Chicago; and starring James Lurie as the voice of Gustav Mahler and Laura Gragtmans as the voice of Natalie Bauer-Lechner.