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.