In a week of semi-staged concerts, Michael Tilson Thomas and the San Francisco Symphony celebrate the city’s musical roots and heritage in Barbary Coast and Beyond: Music from the Gold Rush to the Panama-Pacific Exposition, with music written from the mid-1800s through the Orchestra’s founding in 1911 and its formative years.

With MTT as conductor and host, soprano Laura Claycomb, violinist Vadim Gluzman, pianist Anton Nel, organist Cameron Carpenter and the SFS will perform works brought to San Francisco during its early years by traveling virtuosi such as the pianist Louis Moreau Gottschalk, violinists Ole Bull, Fritz Kreisler and Henryk Wieniawski, and opera stars Adelina Patti and Luisa Tetrazzini. MTT and the SFS present these pieces alongside more familiar works of the time by composers such as Jacques Offenbach, Richard Wagner, Camille Saint-Saëns and John Philip Sousa, capturing the popular tastes and musical pageantry of that age.