Esa-Pekka Salonen And The San Francisco Symphony Close 2024–25 Season With Four Programs Celebrating Salonen

This May and June, Esa-Pekka Salonen and the San Francisco Symphony close out the 2024–25 season with four dynamic programs, marking the culmination of Salonen's influential five-year tenure as Music Director.

May 23–25, Salonen conducts the first San Francisco Symphony performances of Chorale by Magnus Lindberg, one of Salonen's longtime friends and collaborators. The six-minute work is based on the familiar Bach chorale “Es ist genug.” Isabelle Faust joins Salonen and the Orchestra to perform Alban Berg's Violin Concerto, which the composer dedicated to the memory of Manon Gropius, the daughter of Gustav Mahler's widow, who passed away at 18 years old. The program closes with Igor Stravinsky's vibrant The Firebird, based on Russian folklore. Released on Apple Music Classical in 2024, Salonen and the SF Symphony's live concert recording of The Firebird was nominated for the 2025 Grammy Award for Best Orchestral Performance.  

May 29–30 & June 1, Salonen leads the Orchestra in Ludwig van Beethoven's relaxed and cheerful Symphony No. 4, originally commissioned for a Silesian count. Robert Schumann poetically captured the Fourth's relationship to its more heavyweight neighbors when he called it “a slender Grecian maiden between two Nordic giants.” Hilary Hahn joins Salonen and the Orchestra for Beethoven's Violin Concerto, his only violin concerto. The concerto was seldom performed during Beethoven's lifetime but was later rescued from obscurity by violinist Joseph Joachim and composer/conductor Felix Mendelssohn.    

The following week, June 6–8, Salonen conducts the San Francisco Symphony in the world premiere of Rewilding, a new work by composer Gabriella Smith inspired by her work in ecological restoration. Rewilding is a form of ecological restoration that turns areas transformed by humans back into functioning natural ecosystems. “Throughout my life, I've worked on many different rewilding projects around the world, the most recent being on a former airplane runway in Seattle,” said Smith. “There are so many beneficial environmental results of rewilding, but the one that keeps me coming back is pleasure: the pleasure of getting my hands in the dirt, of hearing northern flickers and Bewick's wrens, of biking to and from the site (another climate solution that consistently brings me joy), and the pleasure of being part of something bigger.” The program also features Jean Sibelius's Symphony No. 7, the composer's final symphony, as well as two of Richard Strauss's tone poems—Don Juan and Till Eulenspiegel's Merry Pranks. 

In connection with Gabriella Smith's Rewilding, “Composing the World,” a new lobby exhibit, will be on display in the Davies Symphony Hall First Tier lobby in June. “Composing the World” explores the creative processes of Gabriella Smith and Xavier Muzik—two composers who transform their surroundings into music in strikingly different but equally profound ways. Salonen and the Orchestra also gave the world premiere of Xavier Muzik's Strange Beasts in February 2025.  

Salonen's tenure as Music Director culminates June 12–14 as he conducts the San Francisco Symphony and Chorus—together with soprano Heidi Stober and mezzo-soprano Sasha Cooke—in Gustav Mahler's Symphony No. 2, a realization of the composer's views on universal themes of life, death, and resurrection.  

Salonen and SF Symphony release four new recordings on Apple Music Classical 

Esa-Pekka Salonen and the San Francisco Symphony are scheduled to release four new spatial audio recordings via the Apple Music Classical app in the coming months. Recordings include Sibelius's Finlandia (to be released May 23) and Symphony No. 1 (to be released August 15), both recorded live in concert March 14–16, 2024; Stravinsky's Symphony in Three Movements (to be released July 4), recorded live in concert November 11–12, 2023; and Salonen's Cello Concerto (to be released late summer; date to be announced), recorded live in concert October 18–20, 2024, with SF Symphony Principal Cellist Rainer Eudeikis (Philip S. Boone Chair) as soloist. 

With Apple Music Classical, Apple Music subscribers can easily find any recording in the world's largest classical music catalog with fully optimized search; enjoy the highest audio quality available and experience many classical favorites in a whole new way with immersive Spatial Audio; browse expertly curated playlists, insightful composer biographies, and descriptions of thousands of works; and more. Apple Music Classical is available on the App Store and is included at no extra cost with nearly all Apple Music subscriptions. The combination of Apple Music Classical and Apple Music provides a complete music experience for everyone, from longtime classical fans to first-time listeners, and everyone in between. 

To post a comment, you must register and login.