SFSYO Announces Anniversary Programming

This season will mark the 40th anniversary of the San Francisco Symphony Youth Orchestra (SFSYO). As usual, Wattis Foundation Music Director Daniel Stewart will conduct three Sunday afternoon concerts beginning at 2 p.m. in Davies Symphony Hall over the course of the 2022–23 season, along with the annual contribution of Sergei Prokofiev’s “Peter and the Wolf” to next month’s holiday programming (whose Web page on this site was just updated to provide information about the rest of the concert). Last year subscriptions were sold for the three-concert series. This year, however, tickets are being sold only on a concert-by-concert basis. General admission will be $20 with a $55 rate for seats in the Loge and the Side Boxes.

Tickets are available through the hyperlinks below that are attached to the concert dates. Tickets may also be purchased by calling 415-864-6000. The Box Office will be taking telephone orders from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., Monday through Friday, and from noon to 6 p.m. on Saturday. In addition the Box Office will open at noon on the dates of the three performances. Davies is located on the south side of Grove Street between Van Ness Avenue and Franklin Street. Program specifics and dates are as follows:

November 20: The major work on the program will be Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s Opus 35 symphonic suite entitled Scheherazade. The first half of the program will begin with the “Matsuri” overture by José González Granero, who is based here in San Francisco. This will be followed by Maurice Ravel’s orchestrated version of his Ma mère l'Oye (the French name for Mother Goose) suite.

March 5: The program will feature the winner of the 2022 SFSYO Concerto Competition. That winner is SFSYO Concertmaster Eunseo Oh, and the concerto she will perform will be Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s Opus 35 in D major, his only concerto for violin. The overture for the program will be “Apu: Tone Poem for Orchestra” by Gabriela Lena Frank, who was born in Berkeley and whose music often reflects Peruvian influences. The concluding symphony for the program will be Ludwig van Beethoven’s Opus 67 in C minor, best known as “The Fifth!”

May 21: The final concert of the season will celebrate the 40th anniversary of the institution. The program will reflect the international diversity of musical interests. The overture will be taken from Huan-zhi Li’s Spring Festival, an extended suite that depicts the celebration of the Chinese New Year, drawing upon folk-inspired themes from the Shanbei region in China. This will be followed by George Gershwin’s “international” tone poem, “An American in Paris.” The program will then conclude with Igor Stravinsky’s score for Vaslav Nijinsky’s ballet “The Rite of Spring.” Stravinsky gave his score the subtitle “Pictures of Pagan Russian in Two Parts.”