David Afkham, a rising conductor of very considerable gifts, embraces a big program that begins with Haydn’s Symphony No. 44, Mourning, moves on to Richard Strauss’s Death and Transfiguration, and then lifts into Brahms Symphony No. 3, which CSO played in its very first season—1891—when Brahms was very much alive. As Phillip Huscher has written of the Third’s ending, “in a way that’s virtually unknown to the symphony before the twentieth century, it allows the music to unwind, all its energy spent, content with the memory of the symphony’s opening.” —L.J.