Michael Tilson Thomas returns to the Mondavi Center in Davis

When the Robert and Margrit Mondavi Center for the Performing Arts emerged in 2002 from its construction cocoon after many months of gestation on the UC Davis campus, the region acquired a world-class performance venue that continues to serve as a giant attractor for famous artists and ensembles. Michael Tilson Thomas, outgoing music director of the San Francisco Symphony, returns to the Mondavi on Saturday for a valedictory concert with his Bay Area musicians.

Tilson Thomas was the conductor of the San Francisco Symphony’s first visit to the venue, the inaugural gala that ushered in the Mondavi’s reign as a top-tier setting for a broad palette of performing arts. It was the occasion when he declared that the Mondavi was a “wonderful new instrument.” For this return engagement, Tilson Thomas has chosen Gustav Mahler’s dramatic 9th Symphony in D major, the last of the composer’s completed symphonic works. It is an appropriate capstone to Tilson Thomas’s stewardship of the San Francisco Symphony, which traversed Mahler’s oeuvre during his 25 years as its music director.

Tilson Thomas first encountered the music of Mahler when he was 13 years old, an occasion he described as a “life-changing moment.” The conductor said, “I think Mahler does change the life of all those who play it, and all those who hear it.”

Mahler is a famously eclectic and syncretic composer, who took inspiration from both the elevated and the mundane. “What I’m searching for in performances of Mahler these days is to get really beneath the surface of the music, so that all of the character and color of its many sources — cabaret music and military music and dance music and folk music of so many different traditions — come through,” said Tilson Thomas.

The Mahler 9th will be the single work on the evening’s program, and there will be no intermission. The composer created a sprawling work in four movements that fills a 90-minute evening all by itself. Although Mahler did not intend the 9th as his farewell (he was well into composing a 10th Symphony when he died), there is enough melancholy and dissolution in the music to feel a profound sense of conclusion.

Leonard Bernstein, one of Mahler’s successors as director of the New York Philharmonic, was instrumental in a Mahler renaissance in the 1960s. Of the 9th Symphony, Bernstein said, “It is terrifying, and paralyzing, as the strands of sound disintegrate…. But in letting go, we have gained everything.”

IF YOU GO

The San Francisco Symphony

What: Mahler Symphony No. 9 in D Major

Where: Mondavi Center for the Performing Arts, Davis

When: Saturday, March 7, 8 p.m.

Info and tickets: www.mondaviarts.org; 530-754-2787

Cost: $37.50 to $175.00