Orchestras in San Francisco
The orchestra offers more than 220 concerts and other presentations annually, reaching audiences of nearly 600, 000 locally and through its tours. Highlights of Tilson Thomas' tenure include a highly successful campaign to raise the orchestra's profile in San Francisco; a busy schedule of tours of U.S. cities, Europe, and Asia, including the group's first trip to China; a series of televised performances at the BBC Proms; and opening Carnegie Hall's 2008-2009 season with A Celebration of Leonard Bernstein, which was broadcast on PBS' Great Performances and released on DVD. It also presents semi-staged and multimedia productions, such as Britten's Peter Grimes, produced in the 2013-14 season. The orchestra has significantly increased its recording schedule under Tilson Thomas' leadership, and founded its own label, SFS Media. Since 2001, it has recorded all of Mahler's symphonic works, including works voice and chorus. The orchestra's discography is broadly diverse, but has focused on music of the Romantic and late-Romantic eras, and on Russian and 20th and 21st century American music. It has won 15 Grammys and numerous international recording awards. The orchestra is committed to an ambitious program of education. In 2006, Tilson Thomas and the San Francisco Symphony launched the Keeping Score PBS television series and multimedia project, a national program designed to make classical music more accessible to people of all ages and musical backgrounds. The orchestra offers free community concerts in the Bay Area, plus professional coaching for student and amateur musicians, and its music education program, Adventures in Music, reaches all first- through fifth-grade students in the San Francisco Unified School District.
