MUSIC

Revered German conductor Kurt Masur returns to the BSO podium for the first of two programs with the orchestra this season. (He leads Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis with the BSO in February.) In this all-Brahms program, he is joined by the Russian-born American pianist Yefim Bronfman for Brahms’s by turns lyrical and majestic Piano Concerto No. 2, written more than twenty-five years after the First. Brahms’s Symphony No. 3, the third and most classically contained of his four works in the genre, is as different from the other three as they are from each other, while at the same time matching the Piano Concerto No. 2 in its expressive intensity.