Yale Symphony Orchestra celebrates 60 years of music making

In 1971, the Yale Symphony Orchestra (YSO) performed Gustav Mahler’s monumental Symphony No. 2, “Resurrection,” for the first time, soon after their return to New Haven from a triumphant tour in France. 

Led by its music director at the time, John Mauceri ’67, the orchestra — made up primarily of Yale College undergrads — had received ecstatic reviews from French critics for their concert hall performances, which featured the French premiere of Debussy’s “Khamma.” Audiences were so taken with the young musicians that, even outside the concert hall, “people would recognize them and applaud for them,” Mauceri recalls. 

Mauceri, who was just 25, decided to conclude what had been an “amazing” season for the YSO with a May concert consisting solely of the “enormous, uplifting” symphony by Mahler, which, to the best of his knowledge, had never been performed in New Haven. It seemed apt for the political moment, as the country struggled to come to terms with a highly polarizing war, racial tensions, and political assassinations. 

“It is an epic journey representing Mahler’s preoccupation with life, death, and spirituality,” he said. “It attempts to answer the famous ‘unanswered question’ — with a vision of radiant forgiveness as all humanity returns to God — in its overwhelming final moments involving the orchestra, brass instruments in the balconies, two vocal soloists, a 100-voice chorus, and an enormous pipe organ with all its stops pulled out.” 

The performance sold out the 2,500-seat Woolsey Hall. Mauceri still hears from musicians who played that evening, many of whom tell him the experience was life-changing in its emotional intensity. 

On Saturday, March 28, some of those musicians will return to Woolsey Hall, this time as members of the audience, and Mauceri, now 80, will again conduct Mahler’s Symphony No. 2 in celebration of the YSO’s 60th anniversary. 

The orchestra will be joined in their performance by the Greater New Haven Community Chorus and guest soloists from the Yale Opera program at Yale School of Music. The program begins at 7:30 p.m. in Woolsey Hall. Tickets are available here. 

Tobias Liu, a Yale College senior and the current student president of the YSO, is eagerly anticipating the 60th celebration and the opportunity to perform the Mahler symphony. 

“It is one of the bucket list pieces for many of us musicians, sort of this grand epic, but also very intimate and, I think, transcendental piece of music,” he said. “A lot of alumni will be coming back, and I feel very grateful to be a part of something so incredible.”

‘Totally committed’ 

The YSO was founded in 1965 by a small group of Yale College students. When Mauceri became music director in 1968, he recalls, he set about building it from a chamber orchestra that played to small audiences in Sprague Hall into a full orchestra that performed in Woolsey Hall. 

There is no performance degree for music in Yale College and most of YSO’s 80-90 members are not music majors; rather, they dedicate a considerable portion of their free time to the organization out of sheer love for making music. 

The entry process is quite competitive — around 150 students audition for a seat every August. (All members must reaudition every year.) 

“Most people in the orchestra have been playing music pretty much their entire lives,” said Helen Qi, a junior in her third year of playing viola in the YSO. “By joining YSO, they’re able to keep up their level of musicianship, while also pursuing other interests.” 

The orchestra was a big factor in Liu’s decision to attend Yale. The opportunity to continue to play music “extremely seriously” while also pursuing academic passions (he is majoring in economics and molecular biology) set Yale apart. 

Indeed, said William Boughton, who served as YSO’s music director from 2018 to 2025, after previously directing the New Haven Symphony, “YSO is a place where brilliant young students come together to make music with no ambition to go into the profession for the majority of them. It becomes a massive commitment for them, and they are totally committed to it.” (Boughton is guest conducting and preparing the orchestra during rehearsals while the current director, Elizabeth Askren, is on leave.)

Rehearsals are two-and-a-half hours long, two days a week. The orchestra performs nine or more concerts per season, which are performed in and often livestreamed from Woolsey Hall, Battell Chapel, and other venues on campus and in the region. 

Perhaps the most highly anticipated performance is the annual Halloween concert, which reliably sells out to Yale students in minutes. YSO students put together the concert themselves, selecting music to go along with a Yale-themed silent film of their own creation. The performance takes place at midnight. 

“The Halloween show is a huge bonding experience, especially for first years,” said Qi, who is a YSO publicity officer. “You spend a lot of time making the movie, which is something I got to do last year — I was one of the leads. And you’re playing a lot of pop music combined with classical music and in a silent film soundtrack format — it’s just really fun to do.” 

The musicians also tour abroad every few years — the orchestra has so far visited 13 countries on four continents. Boughton recalls taking the group to North Macedonia and Greece last year, where their performances routinely sold out. 

“The Megaron in Athens, one of the world’s great concert halls, was packed to the gills and it was a fantastic concert,” he said. 

An evolving institution 

In recent years, the YSO has focused on building up their endowment, partly to establish a bank of instruments for loan — a recognition of Yale’s diversified student body. 

“More students were coming to Yale who didn’t have instruments of their own — they’d borrowed instruments from their high schools,” Boughton said. 

The orchestra’s current leadership has also tried to find ways to share the YSO’s music outside of traditional concert spaces. Last December, for example, they teamed up with some New Haven high school students to perform a holiday concert at Union Station.

And in January, about 20 YSO string players put on a concert in collaboration with and within the walls of the Yale Center for Engineering Innovation and Design. 

“One of our aims this academic year has been trying to collaborate with new groups and to reach deeper within our community,” Liu said. “We believe that at our core, what we do as musicians is expression. And innovation isn’t just about designing new tools or technologies, but also about finding new ways of listening, of imagining and expressing.” 

The ever-evolving institution has come a long way from those opening years when the notion of the YSO as a full orchestra existed only in Mauceri’s mind. 

In those days, “every fall when the first years would arrive,” he recalled, “I’d stand in Old Campus listening for a violin or a flute or something. When I heard someone playing, I’d climb the stairs and knock on their door and say, ‘Hello, you don’t know me but…’”