Every other finale offered viewers a communion: a Christmas pageant, a spiritual exorcism, a lake swim.
The finale offers cheerful challenges to the pianist's left hand.
The "Turandot" finale offered Patricia Racette as an equally ardent Liu and Jane Eaglen in the title role, sounding somewhat subdued after the recent rigors of the "Ring".
A Symphony in E flat (Wq 179), the program's finale, offered a thoughtful Larghetto, with shapely themes and stark dynamic contrasts, surrounded by a sunny Prestissimo first movement and a finale that sounded like a hornpipe gone haywire.
Instead, the finale offered a last-second switcheroo that was intended to prod viewers toward Season 2, but that instead prodded them toward their computers, where they howled in rage.
| Sept. 14 at 4: Beck's grand finale offers another four, including the Sonata No. 14 in C-Sharp Minor ("Moonlight") and the valedictory Sonata No. 32 in C Minor.
The Mahler symphony is more world-weary, but its finale offers a child's view of heaven — also a cheerful one, punctuated by sleigh bells and dancing woodwind lines — by way of a text from "Des Knaben Wunderhorn".
The third is a febrile evening of Schumann, consisting of the First ("Spring") and Second Symphonies, and the grand finale offers Schumann's Fourth (in the original version) and Third ("Rhenish") Symphonies, with the U.S. première of Georg Friedrich Haas's "Dark Dreams" in between.
The fourth concert includes, among other works, the Quartet in E-Flat Major, Op. 127; the fifth features the Quartet in C-Sharp Minor, Op. 131; and the finale offers three powerful works, the "Razumovsky" Quartet No. 3, the Quartet in B-Flat Major, Op. 130, and the "Grosse Fuge".
When you've devoted 22 weeks of your life to the vagaries of a serialized show, the season finale offers a multitude of potential satisfactions: that the hero might defeat the villain; that the platonic but made-for-each other couple might become not so platonic; that the arrogant cast member holding out for more money might see their character stricken with a terminal illness.
