Name: A Concert for MTT
Start: 2026-10-02T19:30:00
Location: Davies Symphony Hall

Yuja Wang

Jean-Yves Thibaudet

Teddy Abrams

Edwin Outwater

Sasha Cooke

Jeremy Denk

Bruce Forman

Audra McDonald

John Wilson

San Francisco Symphony

A delectable double dose of Richard Strauss, administered by two of his greatest living interpreters, soprano Renée Fleming and debuting guest conductor Santtu-Matias Rouvali. In the late-life cycle Four Last Songs, Strauss bids a tender farewell to his life in music. Along the way, he pays tribute to Pauline, his diva-soprano spouse, as well as his horn-playing father—radiant French horn solos grace each of the songs. Ein Heldenleben, the irony-infused symphonic poem that Strauss wrote in his mid-30s, is an impassioned portrait of human successes and failures, told with a flair for the dramatic.

Renée Fleming Sings Strauss

Davies Symphony Hall

A beloved San Francisco icon, Michael Tilson Thomas redefined the San Francisco Symphony during his extraordinary 25-year tenure as Music Director. In a one-of-a-kind event, MTT’s longtime friends and artistic collaborators—join the San Francisco Symphony and Chorus in a concert celebrating his life and legacy. The program features music by composers closely associated with MTT, including Gustav Mahler, Leonard Bernstein, George Gershwin, Charles Ives, and Aaron Copland, alongside world premieres by Mason Bates and MTT himself.

A Concert for MTT

Star pianist Lang Lang returns to the Davies Symphony Hall stage to perform a recital featuring Beethoven’s Pathétique Sonata and selections from Albéniz’s Suite española, alongside works by Mozart and Liszt. A leading figure in classical music today—as an award-winning pianist, educator, and philanthropist—he has become one of the world’s most influential and committed ambassadors for the arts in the 21st century.

Lang Lang in Recital

Conductor Karina Canellakis leads a trio of thrilling works that demonstrate the world-building power of the modern orchestra. Victoria Borisova-Ollas’s 2003 tone poem The Kingdom of Silence evokes a vibrant realm of mystery and magic. Scottish violinist Nicola Benedetti brings her signature passion and precision to Prokofiev’s Violin Concerto No. 2, a boldly cosmopolitan showpiece that boasts traditional Russian folk tunes as well as clickety-clackety castanets and other Spanish signifiers. Symphonic Dances, the ailing Rachmaninoff’s spectacular swan song, represents the composer’s late period at its opulent best. Rich in eccentric colors, it conjures up entire galaxies of expression.

Rachmaninoff Symphonic Dances

Ludovico Einaudi: Solo Piano

What’s better than one magnificently talented artist? How about three. Experience the thrilling trifecta of violinist Lisa Batiashvili, cellist Gautier Capuçon, and pianist Jean-Yves Thibaudet as they join forces in piano trios by Shostakovich, Debussy, and Dvořák.

Batiashvili/Capuçon/Thibaudet Trio

Dvořák wrote his Eighth Symphony at his summer home in southern Bohemia, where he hiked, listened to the birds, and felt the sun and wind on his skin. This music revels in the pleasures and mysteries of the natural world, the cycle of life that sustains us. Cellist Pablo Ferrández joins conductor Xian Zhang and the San Francisco Symphony for Tchaikovsky’s Rococo Variations, a poignant evocation of Mozartian order and beauty—a lost world Tchaikovsky longed to inhabit. Composed in 1933, Dances of Galánta rearranges and reinvents the Roma folk music that Kodály first heard in Galánta, the tiny railway town where he spent seven happy years as a child.

Dvořák Symphony No. 8

Lights, Camera, Music! Watch Gore Verbinski’s The Ring on the big screen at Davies Symphony Hall as Hans Zimmer’s score is performed live by the SF Symphony.

The Ring

Joe Hisaishi conducts the SF Symphony-commissioned West Coast premiere of his Concerto for Orchestra, as well as additional contemporary works to be announced. Hisaishi, a composer, conductor, and pianist, has established himself as a formidable force in contemporary music for his delicately crafted symphonic and solo works, as well as his globally successful film music. His credits include 12 enchanting, animated Studio Ghibli films, including Hayao Miyazaki’s Oscar-winning works, as well as being the Composer-in-Association of the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, Composer in Focus of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and Composer in Residence for the Philadelphia Orchestra. These performances mark Hisaishi’s return to the San Francisco Symphony following four sold-out performances of his music in September 2024.

Hisaishi Conducts Hisaishi

Bring the whole family to the San Francisco Symphony’s first Music for Families concert of the new season—a vibrant exploration of the animal kingdom through music! Experience music from Rimsky-Korsakov’s “Flight of the Bumblebee,” Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf, Saint-Saëns’s Carnival of the Animals, and more, as prowling cats, lumbering elephants, chirping birds, buzzing bumblebees, and all your favorite animals come to Davies Symphony Hall. Resident Conductor of Engagement and Education Daniel Bartholomew-Poyser conducts this engaging concert with the SF Symphony—the perfect outing to spark musical curiosity in all ages!

Music for Families

Rafael Payare and Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal return to Davies Symphony Hall for a program featuring Shostakovich’s intensely passionate Tenth Symphony. Played here by Leonidas Kavakos, Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto sells itself: a showpiece with a heart.

Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal

Elim Chan conducts the Symphony in a stunning quartet of works that delve into the great unknown. In Nänie, Brahms memorializes a beloved friend with a poignant choral funeral song, transforming sorrowful resignation into humble gratitude. Renaud Capuçon regales us with the lustrous melodies, vibrant textures, and glittering pyrotechnics of Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto. Arvo Pärt’s shimmering a cappella Magnificat exemplifies the tintinnabuli style, which the composer invented and named after the bell-like resonance produced by a triad. John Adams’s Doctor Atomic Symphony, a condensed instrumental version of his 2005 opera, cloaks Nuclear Age anxiety in dark orchestral splendor.