On April 20, Michael Tilson Thomas leads the New World Symphony in a program comprised exclusively of premieres. NWS alumnus Alex Orfaly will premiere his Divertissement No. 2 for Solo Timpani and Ensemble. Orfaly's first Divertissement won a Percussive Arts Society award in 2001. MTT and the NWS will also premiere Samuel Carl Adams's Drift and Providence, a large-scale work for orchestra and electronics. The concert will also feature Little Alice for String Quartet by the recent Guggenheim fellow, singer-songwriter, poet, and composer Amy Beth Kirsten. Marcos Balter's Wind Octet, On Floating Bodies rounds out the evening.

Also included will be a poetry reading by Malachi Black in collaboration with National Poetry Month and O, Miami, the biennial Miami-Dade poetry festival, and an excerpt from Street by filmmaker James Nares. Street will also be shown Monday, April 16 through Friday, April 20 at 8:00 PM and 9:30 PM on the New World Center's exterior projection façade (excluding Wednesday, April 18, when it will only be shown at approximately 10:15 PM).

Purchase tickets for the NWS's all-premiere concert on April 20.

MTT and the San Francisco Symphony take  American Mavericks on tour to  Chicago (March 21),  Ann Arbor (March 22, 23, 24, 25) and New York  (March 27, 28, 29, 30). These concerts will examine the music of iconoclastic, revolutionary composers championed by MTT and the SFS, such as John Cage, Morton Feldman, Carl Ruggles, Edgard Varèse, and Charles Ives, and expand the maverick roster with commissions by Bay Area composers John Adams and Mason Bates. Concerts will feature performances by longtime SFS collaborators Jessye Norman, Emanuel Ax, Meredith Monk, Jeremy Denk, and the St. Lawrence String Quartet, among others.

Learn more about the performances and purchase tickets here.

On March 15, 16 & 17, MTT and the San Francisco Symphony will present two world premieres at Davies Symphony Hall as part of the American Mavericks Festival, their month-long exploration of the American sound. Their program will open with Mason Bates's Mass Transmission, a work that showcases his unique style of electronica and choral writing. This will be followed by John Adams's Absolute Jest, a piece based on scherzo fragments from late Beethoven quartets and to be performed in collaboration with the St. Lawrence String Quartet. In addition to these two world premieres, the concerts will also include Feldman's Piano and Orchestra featuring Emanuel Ax at the keyboard. The program concludes with Amériques by the French American composer Edgard Varèse.
 
This year's American Mavericks Festival has also given the world premieres of Meredith Monk's Realm Variations and Morton Subotnick's Jacob's Room: Monodrama. You can hear Monk's Realm Variations in Ann Arbor (March 25) and New York (March 30), and her performance of John Cage's Song Books in Ann Arbor (March 23) and at New York's Carnegie Hall (March 27). Subotnick's Jacobs' Room will be performed in Ann Arbor (March 25) and in New York (March 30).
 
Learn more & purchase tickets for MTT's March 15, 16, 17 SFS concerts.

Hear American Mavericks on tour in Chicago, Ann Arbor and New York

Next season, MTT leads the San Francisco Symphony in 17 weeks of programs at home in San Francisco and on tour in Asia and the United States. Highlights include explorations of music by Stravinsky and Beethoven, tracing both composers' early musical influences and ideas from rarely performed pieces forward through their later, well-known works.  The 2012-2013 season will also feature staged concert productions around Grieg's Peer Gynt and Beethoven's Missa solemnis with video elements, and lead the first-ever concert performances by an orchestra of Bernstein's complete music for West Side Story.
 
MTT and the Orchestra will premiere new works by contemporary composers, including performances of new commissions by Jörg Widmann, Robin Holloway, and Samuel Carl Adams, and the world premiere of a work by SFS Assistant Concertmaster Mark Volkert.
 
Among the many other highlights next season, the SFS will perform two Mahler symphonies at Davies Symphony Hall and on tour. Audiences will hear Mahler's Symphony No. 5 on the Orchestra's tour throughout Asia, and Mahler's Symphony No. 9 will be performed at Carnegie Hall and in Washington, D.C. The Orchestra's Opening Gala on September 19 features an all-French program, with violinist Joshua Bell performing Saint-Saëns's Introduction and Rondo capriccioso and Chausson's Poème. Pianists Yuja Wang and Lang Lang will be also be guest soloists of the SFS, and MTT will lead the Orchestra in Bruckner's Symphony No. 7.

Click here for the full season announcement and learn more MTT and the SFS's 2012-2013 season.

This weekend, the American Mavericks festival continues with programs featuring three of the most distinctive vocalists today. On March 10 and 14, Jessye Norman, Meredith Monk, and Joan La Barbara participate in an American Mavericks performance of John Cage's Song Books led by MTT. The American pianist Jeremy Denk performs Cowell's percussive yet melodic Piano Concerto in three movements, entitled "Polyharmony," "Tone Cluster" and "Counter Rhythm."
 
Click here to view the full program and to purchase tickets.