"Well, the most obvious thing is, when I became music director, it was, in fact, sort of semi-pro and a true community orchestra," he said during an interview from his Larkspur home in Marin County. "It's been transformed into a fine professional orchestra."

He then noted that several orchestra members have remained with the symphony during his tenure. That can be interpreted not only as a sign of player loyalty but also mutual respect for one another, as people and musicians, he added.

"We've established an atmosphere in the way we all work together," said Ramadanoff, who, on Saturday at Hogan High in Vallejo, will lead an augmented 70-member orchestra in Mahler's formidable Symphony No. 5. "They enjoy working together and working with me."

Some of the orchestra's critically acclaimed performances are due to sectional strengths (strings, percussion, brass, woodwinds) that have been cultivated during the past two decades, he said.

"That's really allowed them to sound as good or better than orchestras with two or three times our budget," said Ramadanoff, a Cleveland native and former assistant conductor of the San Francisco Symphony under Seiji Ozawa.

Additionally, the orchestra's willingness to tackle new works and major works, such as Beethoven's "Choral" Symphony last year, have prepared the players for the Mahler, he noted.

"It's going to be of equal importance (as other demanding works that have been performed)," he said. "Maybe some people have heard it in San Francisco, but they haven't heard it here. That's going to be a huge milestone."

Indeed, something of a veritable event for classical music lovers in Solano county - and a considerable investment of time and patience for listeners.

The five-movement work, organized into three parts and finished in 1902, clocks in at more than 66 minutes, nearly twice the length of the standard late 19th-century symphony. Keyed in C sharp minor, it begins with funeral music, followed by a manic-sounding scherzo, and ends with a beautiful adagietto (the only movement with just strings and harp) and a lively rondo. Mahler was never satisfied with the work's orchestrations and continued to revise it until his death in 1911.

"Clearly, it was a piece that meant a lot to him," said Ramadanoff, adding that the adagietto was written as a tribute to Mahler's wife, Alma.

Mahler's Fifth is not the first work by the Austrian composer, noted for his expressions of neuroses and mysticism in his symphonies and song cycles, that the Vallejo Symphony has performed. Years ago, the orchestra performed Mahler's First or "Titan" Symphony and later tried its hand at his "Songs of a Wayfarer."

But the Fifth is generally regarded as Mahler's most accessible and the best-known piece and showcases the skills and expertise of an entire symphony, said Ramadanoff, noting why he selected it.

"What he was trying to do in the Fifth was get away from writing what he called 'program music,' " he explained. "He was trying to convey a message through purely instrumental means, the emotional language you hear from the colors of the instruments, the harmonies. This symphony is a catharsis symphony. You start out with a problem and work through it."

He continued, "Mahler is a composer - in a lot of respects - that people can identify with. We live in difficult times and through sheer will power and sheer reaching for a positive way, we find our way. That's really it in a nutshell, the message of the piece."

Ramadanoff, again referring to the sublime sound of the adagietto - "A song without words," he said - noted that it was used in Sen. Robert Kennedy's memorial service in 1968 and in the 1971 film "Death in Venice."

"So the sound of it is very familiar to people," he said. "Everyone will hear sounds that are familiar," because 20th-century composers such as John Williams ("Star Wars" theme) and Richard Strauss ("Also Sprach Zarathustra") used them.

A tall, lean man with a swept-back shock of brown hair, Ramadanoff grew up in a musical household in Cleveland, Ohio, and earned a master's degree from Temple University and later taught conducting at the famed Juilliard School in Manhattan. He is known locally as an approachable person on and off the stage, prefacing performances with "Know the Score" lectures, explaining what audiences will hear and providing history about the composer.

"It's creating an atmosphere of discovering it together," he said of the pre-concert lectures.

Ramadanoff believes the Vallejo Symphony board of directors hired him because they saw in him a vision to make the orchestra a better ensemble. He accomplished his goal, he said, by gradually increasing pay for players and section leaders.

"The board saw that the symphony was being transformed and they supported that and they supported me and I've always been grateful for that," he said.

Solano Choral Society leader Helen Intintoli said that when she first met Ramadanoff 25 years ago, she was in awe of him.