This week, Esa-Pekka Salonen conducts his own composition, Sinfonia Concertante for Organ and Orchestra, with soloist Iveta Apkalna. The program also includes Richard Strauss’ Don Juan and Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra. Opening the broadcast, Pierre Boulez leads Stravinsky’s Four Studies for Orchestra.
In Variations on a Theme of Joseph Haydn, Brahms travels in time, using ancient musical forms to explore possible futures. In Beethoven’s Second Symphony, anarchic glee subverts Classical elegance. Between the two big Bs, precisely in the present, Esa-Pekka Salonen debuts his longtime friend Anders Hillborg’s witty and colorful new Piano Concerto, performed with genial sophistication by soloist Emanuel Ax.
Season Premiere: Conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen, soloist Pekka Kuusisto, and composer/developer Jesper Nordin’s cutting-edge electronics come together in Nordin’s radical reinvention of the violin concerto, Convergence. In Naïve and Sentimental Music, dedicated to Salonen, John Adams celebrates a similar creative impulse: spontaneity, the spirit of free play.
This week, Esa-Pekka Salonen leads the CSO in Ravel’s Mother Goose, Stravinsky’s Symphony in Three Movements, and Dessner’s Violin Concerto, featuring soloist Pekka Kuusisto. Rounding out the program, Sir George Solti conducts Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra.
Sunday, February 2, 2025, is the year’s biggest night for music. Peruse the classical, jazz, contemporary, folk, screen, and stage nominees, and see the winners as they’re announced!
Season Finale: Music Director Esa-Pekka Salonen leads the San Francisco Symphony in Beethoven’s expansive Symphony No. 3, Eroica, while pianist Igor Levit plays the composer’s Emperor Concerto.
Spellbinding pianist Yuja Wang returns to the San Francisco Symphony to take on Rachmaninoff’s Third Piano Concerto. Music Director Esa-Pekka Salonen conducts this program, which also includes Gabriella Smith’s Tumblebird Contrails and Salonen’s mysterious tone poem Nyx.
Opening this program led by Music Director Esa-Pekka Salonen, pianist Conor Hanick premieres a San Francisco Symphony commission by Samuel Adams. Then, Anton Bruckner’s Sixth Symphony, full of imaginative twists and turns.
Pierre-Laurent Aimard joins Music Director Esa-Pekka Salonen and the San Francisco Symphony for Bela Bartók’s zany Second Piano Concerto, in a program also featuring Sergei Prokofiev’s vibrant Romeo and Juliet and Maurice Ravel’s Le Tombeau de Couperin.
Music Director Esa-Pekka Salonen and the San Francisco Symphony journey through Hector Berlioz’s phantasmic Symphonie fantastique, Franz Liszt’s devilish Totentanz with pianist Bertrand Chamayou, and Modest Mussorgsky’s supernatural Night on Bald Mountain.
Igor Stravinsky’s explosive ballet score, The Firebird, along with Jean Sibelius’s cosmic Luonnotar with soprano Golda Schultz, and the United States premiere of Daniel Kidane’s SF Symphony commission, Sun Poem.
Season Premiere: Esa-Pekka Salonen conducts the SF Symphony in Gustav Mahler’s glorious Symphony No. 2 with vocalists Golda Schultz and Michelle DeYoung and the world premiere of Push by Trevor Weston.
