The DSO’s 2025–2026 season, and celebration of America at 250, opens with an energetic work by Composer-in-Residence Michael Abels, inspired by a painting of Jesse Owens. The celebration continues with Gershwin’s jazz-influenced showcase for piano and orchestra featuring Hélène Grimaud and conclu...

This pair of works takes classical music to the heights of celebration and mirth. Giuseppe Gibboni performs Wynton Marsalis’s exuberant Violin Concerto, rooted in the blues with thrilling high-wire feats for the soloist. Shostakovich’s Ninth is one of the composer’s most jovial symphonies, a defi...

This program explores a line of development of Viennese musical style: from Mozart’s overture to one of his most beloved comic operas, to Brahms’s monumental First Piano Concerto played here by Kirill Gerstein, to an early work by Schoenberg full of lush harmonies and indebted to Brahms’s express...

Carl Orff’s enormous work for orchestra, soloists, and choir sings of worldly pleasures and the ups and downs of fortune. The program begins with two contemporary classics by Michael Abels: "Global Warming," which combines the music of a variety of cultures (originally written to celebrate warmin...

Mozart’s deeply expressive Symphony No. 40 remains one of his most enduring works. Acclaimed pianist Francesco Piemontesi joins Jader Bignamini for Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 1, full of bold contrasts and playful stylistic turns. This thrilling program begins with Beethoven’s "Coriolan" Overt...

Nikolaj Szeps-Znaider performs treasures of German Romanticism, both as violin soloist and conductor. Bruch’s Violin Concerto No. 1 is a virtuosic display that also wears its heart on its sleeve with aching melodies and a lush orchestral accompaniment. Brahms’s Symphony No. 2 exudes lyrical beaut...

Celebrated American conductor Jonathon Heyward returns in a program featuring the all-star Kanneh-Mason siblings in Beethoven’s rarely performed Triple Concerto, effectively a concerto for piano trio and orchestra. Mendelssohn’s “Italian” Symphony takes inspiration from the composer’s travels in ...

Experience works by Pulitzer Prize-winning composers, including the world premiere of Michael Abels’s suite from his and Rhiannon Giddens’s opera "Omar," based Omar ibn Said’s 1831 autobiography, the only memoir of an American slave written in Arabic. Wynton Marsalis’s Swing Symphony features the...

Alisa Weilerstein, one of today’s foremost cellists, performs a concerto written for her by Joan Tower and co-commissioned by the DSO. Tower’s work shows a range of influences, from the rhythms she heard during her childhood in South America to the driving pulse found in the music of Beethoven—wh...

Berlioz’s "Symphonie fantastique" tells the story of a quintessential Romantic artist, complete with a lovelorn obsession, a pastoral scene in the country, frightful hallucinations, and a wild witches’ sabbath. Emmanuel Pahud, hailed as a “one-in-a-generation flutist” ("San Francisco Classical Re...

Premiered by trombonist Kenneth Thompkins and the DSO in 2023, Carlos Simon’s moving concerto commemorates the Underground Railroad and, in Simon’s words, “the stories, accounts, and experiences told by many enslaved people and abolitionists.” Thomas Wilkins also conducts William Grant Still’s vi...

Mendelssohn’s beloved Violin Concerto, played here by DSO Concertmaster Robyn Bollinger, is awash in lyricism and virtuosic displays. Conducted by Mendelssohn at its premiere, Schumann’s buoyant “Spring” Symphony delights in celebrating the season of renewal. Composer and conductor Jörg Widmann o...

Led by Principal Guest Conductor Tabita Berglund, the DSO’s Northern Lights Festival begins in Finland with Rautavaara’s pairing of orchestra with recorded birdsong, and Sibelius’s breathtaking, stormy Violin Concerto. Continuing to Berglund’s native Norway, Grieg’s incidental music to Ibsen’s "P...

The DSO’s Northern Lights Festival continues with compositions from Sweden and Denmark. Norwegian violinist Eldbjørg Hemsing makes her DSO debut with an ethereal concerto by Anders Hillborg. Principal Guest Conductor Tabita Berglund, a Norwegian native, also leads the orchestra in the dramatic in...

Dvořák’s “New World” Symphony, written during his time in the US, draws on the character of American musical traditions, charting a path for later composers. The concert also looks elsewhere in the New World, with works from Mexico and Argentina that similarly incorporate national styles: Arturo ...

In this special appearance, legendary conductor Herbert Blomstedt leads Mahler’s last completed symphony. Traversing practically every emotion, it achieves what Mahler believed a symphony should do: contain everything. The music oscillates between titanic, vehement power and beauty on the scale o...

Written for Baroque orchestra, Stacy Garrop’s Handel-inspired concert opener features bursts of musical color and leads perfectly into "Music for the Royal Fireworks." Musical pyrotechnics continue in the jubilant trumpet line of Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No. 2 and conclude with Haydn’s beloved...

Stravinsky’s extravagant "Song of the Nightingale" is based on a fairy tale by Hans Christian Andersen. John Adams’s work was inspired by the colors, shapes, and sounds of Stravinsky’s piece. Stories of fanciful birds continue with music from Tchaikovsky’s "Swan Lake" and DSO Principal Cello Wei ...

Stories of tragic love unfold through the expressive power of the orchestra. Wagner’s "Tristan und Isolde" conveys the tender weight of grief with exquisite harmonies, and Tchaikovsky recounts forbidden lovers from Dante’s "Inferno" who are eternally tossed in the wind. The highs and lows of a bi...

Superstar violinist Hilary Hahn returns with Mozart’s majestic Violin Concerto No. 5. Nicknamed the “Turkish” concerto, it contains a lively section meant to evoke an Ottoman military band. The season concludes with a flourish as Jader Bignamini leads the DSO in Rachmaninoff’s sumptuous Second Sy...