San Francisco Symphony - San Francisco

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Johannes Brahms was a German composer, pianist, and conductor of the Romantic period. Born in Hamburg into a Lutheran family, Brahms spent much of his professional life in Vienna. His reputation and status as a composer are such that he is sometimes grouped with Johann Sebastian Bach and Ludwig van Beethoven as one of the "Three Bs" of music, a comment originally made by the nineteenth-century conductor Hans von Bülow.

Joshua David Bell is an American Grammy award-winning violinist and conductor. He plays the Gibson Stradivarius.

James Christopher Gaffigan is an American stand-up comedian, actor, writer, and producer. He was raised in Chesterton, Indiana. His material is often about fatherhood, observations, laziness, and food. He is also regarded as a "clean" comic, using little profanity in his routines. He has had several successful comedy specials, including Mr. Universe, Obsessed, and Cinco, all three of which received Grammy nominations. His memoir, Dad Is Fat and his most recent book, Food: A Love Story, are both published by Crown Publishers. He co-created and starred in a TV Land television series based on his life called The Jim Gaffigan Show.

The Jacobin is an opera in three acts by Antonín Dvo?ák to an original Czech libretto by Marie ?ervinková-Riegrová. ?ervinková-Riegrová took some of the story's characters from the story by Alois Jirásek, "At the Ducal Court", but devised her own plot about them. The first performance was at the National Theatre, Prague, 1889. ?ervinková-Riegrová revised the libretto, with Dvo?ák's permission, in 1894, notably in the last act. Dvo?ák himself revised the music in 1897.

Christian Tetzlaff is a German violinist.

Cristian M?celaru is a Romanian conductor.

Simone Margaret Young AM is an Australian conductor. She was born in Sydney, of Irish ancestry on her father's side and Croatian ancestry on her mother's side. Young was educated at the Monte Sant' Angelo Mercy College in North Sydney. She studied composition, piano and conducting at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music.

Sergei Vasilyevich Rachmaninoff was a Russian pianist, composer, and conductor of the late Romantic period, some of whose works are among the most popular in the Romantic repertoire.

Pierre-Laurent Aimard is a French pianist.

Tony DeSare is a jazz singer, pianist and songwriter. He has performed throughout the United States, as well as in Australia, Japan and Hong Kong. He continues to perform all over the world in theaters, jazz clubs and with symphony orchestras. His original songs have been featured in the 20th Century Fox film The Tooth Fairy, and the 2005 Indie hit My Date With Drew.

Nicola Joy Nadia Benedetti CBE is a Scottish classical violinist.

Manfred Honeck is an Austrian conductor and the Music Director of the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra since the 2008/2009 season. In 2018, he was named Artist of the Year by the International Classical Music Awards. On January 28, 2018, Honeck and the PSO were awarded the 2018 Grammy Award for Best Orchestral Performance for their recording of Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 5 and Barber’s Adagio for Strings. The recording won a second Grammy for Best Engineered Album.

India Arie Simpson, best known as India.Arie is an American singer-songwriter, actress, musician, and record producer. She has sold over 3.3 million records in the US and 10 million worldwide. She has won four Grammy Awards from her 21 nominations, including Best R&B Album.

Christoph Eschenbach is a German pianist and conductor.

Jean-Yves Thibaudet is a French pianist. Jean-Yves Thibaudet was born in Lyon, France, to non-professional musical parents. His father played the violin, and his mother, of German origin and a somewhat accomplished pianist herself, introduced the instrument to Jean-Yves.

Alan Cumming OBE is a Scottish-American actor, comedian, singer, writer, producer, director, and activist who has appeared in numerous films, television shows, and plays. His London stage appearances include Hamlet, the Maniac in Accidental Death of an Anarchist, the lead in Bent, and The National Theatre of Scotland's The Bacchae. On Broadway, he has appeared in The Threepenny Opera, as the master of ceremonies in Cabaret, Design for Living and a one-man adaptation of Macbeth. His best-known film roles include his performances in Emma, GoldenEye, the Spy Kids trilogy, Son of the Mask, and X2. Cumming also introduces Masterpiece Mystery! for PBS and appeared on The Good Wife, for which he has been nominated for three Primetime Emmy Awards, two Screen Actors Guild Awards, two Golden Globe Awards and a Satellite Award. A filming of his Las Vegas cabaret show, Alan Cumming Sings Sappy Songs, aired on PBS stations in November 2016.

Herbert Blomstedt, is a Swedish conductor. Herbert Blomstedt was born in Springfield, Massachusetts, and two years after his birth, his Swedish parents moved the family back to their country of origin. He studied at the Stockholm Royal College of Music and the University of Uppsala, followed by studies of contemporary music at Darmstadt in 1949, Baroque music with Paul Sacher at the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis, and further conducting studies with Igor Markevitch, Jean Morel at the Juilliard School, and Leonard Bernstein at Tanglewood's Berkshire Music Center. Blomstedt also lived in Finland during his youth.

Peter Bernstein is an American jazz guitarist.

Dima Slobodeniouk is a musician.

Dmitri Dmitriyevich Shostakovich was a Russian composer and pianist. He is regarded as one of the major composers of the 20th century.

Daniel Stewart Sherman is an actor.

Kevin John Edusei is a German conductor. Edusei is of mixed Ghanaian and German ancestry, with a Ghanaian physician father, and a German historian, theologian, and pastor mother. His material grandmother, Antonie Wingels, was an opera singer with the Theater Bielefeld. He learned piano as a youth, and subsequently changed his musical study interests to percussion. At age 14, he became a percussionist with the youth orchestra in Ostwestfalen-Lippe. He studied percussion, sound engineering, and conducting at the Berlin University of the Arts. He continued his formal academic music studies at the Royal Conservatory of The Hague, where his teachers included Jac van Steen and Ed Spanjaard.

Monsieur Periné is a Bogotá-based musical ensemble from Colombia with an Afro-Colombian sound that mixes Latin and European flavors. Lead singer Catalina García sings in a mixture of Spanish, French, English, and Portuguese. Other members include Nicolás Junca on the guitar; Santiago Prieto, who plays the charango, violin, and guitar; Adinda Meertins on the double bass; Jairo Alfonso on the winds; Abstin Caviedes on the trombone and bugle; Miguel Guerra on percussion; and Darwin Baez on the drums. Their style mixes elements of cumbia, tango, danzón, bolero and pop music, according to the San Diego Union Tribune. At the Latin Grammy Awards, the ensemble was named best new artist of 2015. Their debut album in 2012 won Colombia's national gold album award. The group was formed in 2008.

Karina Canellakis is an American conductor and violinist.

Leif Ove Andsnes is a Norwegian pianist and chamber musician. Andsnes has made several recordings for Virgin and EMI. For his current "Beethoven Journey" project, Andsnes performed and recorded all five of the composer’s piano concertos with the Mahler Chamber Orchestra; they have been released on Sony Classical. He is represented by IMG.

Lang Lang is a Chinese concert pianist who has performed with leading orchestras in Europe, the United States, Canada and his native China.

Pink Martini is a musical group that was formed in 1994 by pianist Thomas Lauderdale in Portland, Oregon. Members of the band call it a little orchestra that crosses the genres of classical music, classic pop, Latin music, and jazz. The co-lead vocalists for Pink Martini are China Forbes and Storm Large.

Marek Janowski is a Polish-born German conductor. Janowski grew up in Wuppertal near Cologne, after his mother traveled there at the start of World War II to be with her parents. His father disappeared in Poland during the war.

The Beethoven film series is a series of eight American films, created by John Hughes and Amy Holden Jones, in which the plot revolves around a family attempting to control the antics of their pet Saint Bernard. The first two films were theatrical releases and all after have been direct to video. The original Beethoven hit theaters in April 1992. Its opening grossed $7,587,565. It was the year's 26th largest grossing film in the U.S. at $57,114,049.

Hilary Hahn is an American violinist. In her active international career she has performed throughout the world both as a soloist with leading orchestras and conductors and as a recitalist. She also has built a reputation for championing contemporary music. Several composers have written works especially for her, including concerti by Edgar Meyer and Jennifer Higdon and partitas by Antón García Abril.

Piano Concerto No. 3 in C major, Op. 26, is a piano concerto by Sergei Prokofiev. It was completed in 1921 using sketches first started in 1913.

Gil Shaham is an American violinist of Israeli Jewish descent.

The Symphony No. 6 in A minor by Gustav Mahler is a symphony in four movements, composed in 1903 and 1904, with revisions from 1906. It is sometimes nicknamed the Tragic, though the origin of the name is unclear.

Yefim "Fima" Naumovich Bronfman is a Soviet-born Israeli-American pianist.

Branford Marsalis is an American saxophonist, composer, and bandleader. While primarily known for his work in jazz as the leader of the Branford Marsalis Quartet, he also performs frequently as a soloist with classical ensembles and has led the group Buckshot LeFonque.

Die Walküre, WWV 86B is the second of the four music dramas that constitute Richard Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen,. It was performed, as a single opera, at the National Theatre Munich on 26 June 1870, and received its first performance as part of the Ring cycle at the Bayreuth Festspielhaus on 14 August 1876.

John Towner Williams is an American composer, conductor, and pianist. With a career spanning over six decades, he has composed some of the most popular and recognizable film scores in cinematic history, including the Star Wars series, Jaws, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Superman, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, the Indiana Jones series, the first two Home Alone films, the first two Jurassic Park films, Schindler's List, and the first three Harry Potter films. Williams has been associated with director Steven Spielberg since 1974, composing music for all but three of his feature films. Other notable works by Williams include theme music for the 1984 Summer Olympic Games, NBC Sunday Night Football, "The Mission" theme used by NBC News and Seven News in Australia, the television series Lost in Space and Land of the Giants, and the incidental music for the first season of Gilligan's Island. Williams has also composed numerous classical concertos and other works for orchestral ensembles a

Fabien Gabel is a French conductor. He is currently the Music Director of the Quebec Symphony Orchestra.

Yuja Wang is a Chinese classical pianist. She was born in Beijing, began studying piano there at age six, and went on to study at the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing and the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia. By the age of 21 she was already an internationally recognized concert pianist, giving recitals around the world. She has a recording contract with Deutsche Grammophon. In an interview with the Los Angeles Times, she said “For me, playing music is about transporting to another way of life, another way of being. An actress does that.” Yuja Wang lives in New York City.

Igor Levit, born 1987 in Gorky is a Russian-German pianist.

Darren Everett Criss is an American actor, singer, and songwriter. He rose to fame starring on the television series Glee and received Emmy and Golden Globe acting awards for his leading role as spree killer Andrew Cunanan in The Assassination of Gianni Versace: American Crime Story. He has also appeared on Broadway and in film and has released several recordings as a soloist and in a band.

The Alonzo King LINES Ballet is an American contemporary ballet company based in the San Francisco Bay Area. The ballet company, founded by choreographer Alonzo King, premiered at San Francisco State University's McKenna Theatre in 1982.

Michael Tilson Thomas is an American conductor, pianist and composer. He is currently music director of the San Francisco Symphony, and artistic director of the New World Symphony, an American orchestral academy based in Miami Beach, Florida.

Emil de Cou is an American conductor who became associate conductor of the National Symphony Orchestra in September 2003. He has led the orchestra on residency tours in five states, in subscription concerts at the Kennedy Center and on the West Lawn of the United States Capitol Building. In 2005 de Cou was named NSO at Wolf Trap Festival Conductor and will start his 15th season with that organization in the summer of 2019. He was appointed the music director of the Pacific Northwest Ballet starting with the 2011-2012 season. In 2013, he was described by New York Times critic Alastair Macaulay to be "probably...America’s finest ballet conductor."

Esa-Pekka Salonen is a Finnish orchestral conductor and composer. He is principal conductor and artistic advisor of the Philharmonia Orchestra in London, conductor laureate of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and music director-designate of the San Francisco Symphony.

Edward Gardner OBE is an English conductor.

Armando Anthony "Chick" Corea is an American jazz pianist/electric keyboardist and composer. His compositions "Spain", "500 Miles High", "La Fiesta" and "Windows", are considered jazz standards. As a member of Miles Davis's band in the late 1960s, he participated in the birth of jazz fusion. In the 1970s he formed the fusion band Return to Forever. With Herbie Hancock, McCoy Tyner, and Keith Jarrett, he has been described as one of the major jazz piano voices to emerge in the post-John Coltrane era.

Jurassic Park is a 1993 American science fiction adventure film directed by Steven Spielberg and produced by Kathleen Kennedy and Gerald R. Molen. It is the first installment in the Jurassic Park franchise, and is based on the 1990 novel of the same name by Michael Crichton and a screenplay written by Crichton and David Koepp. The film is set on the fictional island of Isla Nublar, located off Central America's Pacific Coast near Costa Rica. There, wealthy businessman John Hammond and a team of genetic scientists have created a wildlife park of de-extinct dinosaurs. When industrial sabotage leads to a catastrophic shutdown of the park's power facilities and security precautions, a small group of visitors and Hammond's grandchildren struggle to survive and escape the perilous island.

Beatrice Rana is an Italian pianist. Born in Copertino, Rana began studying piano at the age of 4, and made her orchestral debut at 9, performing Bach's Piano Concerto in F minor. She studied with Arie Vardi at the Hochschule für Musik in Hannover and Benedetto Lupo at the Nino Rota Conservatory of Music in Monopoli.

Romeo and Juliet, Op. 64, is a ballet by Sergei Prokofiev based on William Shakespeare's play Romeo and Juliet. Prokofiev reused music from the ballet in three suites for orchestra and a solo piano work.

Jeremy Denk is an American classical pianist.

The New Jersey Symphony Orchestra is an American symphony orchestra based in the state of New Jersey. The NJSO is the state orchestra of New Jersey, performing concert series in six venues across the state, and is the resident orchestra of the New Jersey Performing Arts Center in Newark, New Jersey.

Murray David Perahia, KBE is an American pianist and conductor.

Michael Abels is an American composer and arranger who specializes in concert orchestral music, with elements of blues, jazz, and bluegrass music. He is most popularly known for composing the score for the 2017 horror film Get Out directed by Jordan Peele; both the film and its score have been critically acclaimed. Other works include the one-act opera Homies and Popz, with a libretto by Bernardo Solano, commissioned by the Los Angeles Opera and premiered in 2000.

Thomas Wilkins is an orchestra conductor. He is the music director of the Omaha Symphony Orchestra, principal conductor of the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra, and family and youth concerts conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra.

Daniil Olegovich Trifonov is a Russian pianist and composer. Described by The Globe and Mail as "arguably today's leading classical virtuoso" and by The Times as "without question the most astounding pianist of our age", Trifonov's honors include a Grammy Award win in 2018 and the Gramophone Classical Music Awards' Artist of the Year Award in 2016. The New York Times has noted that "few artists have burst onto the classical music scene in recent years with the incandescence" of Trifonov. He has performed as soloist with such orchestras as the New York Philharmonic, Cleveland Orchestra, Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, London Symphony Orchestra, Mariinsky Theatre Orchestra, Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, Berlin Philharmonic, San Francisco Symphony and the Munich Philharmonic, and has given solo recitals in such venues as Royal Festival Hall, Carnegie Hall, John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, Berliner Philharmonie, Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, Concertgebouw, and the Seoul Arts Ce

Coco is a 2009 French comedy film written, directed, and starring Gad Elmaleh. The film is based on a character sketch he created for his one-man show "La Vie Normale". The film earned $8.5 million in its opening weekend at the French box office, and went on to gross $11.7 million in the European market. Although it was a box office success, Coco was not well received by critics. It received only one star out of four from Première, Paris Match, and Télérama, and two stars from Elle and Le Journal du Dimanche.

Nikolaj Szeps-Znaider is a Danish violinist and conductor.

Gustavo Adolfo Dudamel Ramírez is a Venezuelan-Spanish conductor and violinist. He is the music director of the Orquesta Sinfónica Simón Bolívar and the Los Angeles Philharmonic.

Ragnar Bohlin is a Swedish conductor born in 1965.

Tracy Darrell Adkins is an American country music singer and actor. Adkins made his debut in 1996 with the album Dreamin' Out Loud, released on Capitol Records Nashville. Since then, Adkins has released ten more studio albums and two Greatest Hits compilations. In addition, he has charted more than 20 singles on the Billboard country music charts, including the Number One hits No Thinkin' Thing", "Ladies Love Country Boys", and "You're Gonna Miss This", which peaked in 1997, 2007, and 2008, respectively.

Mirga Gražinyt?-Tyla is a Lithuanian conductor. She is currently music director of the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra in England.

Anne-Sophie Mutter is a German violinist. She was supported early in her career by Herbert von Karajan, and has had several works composed specially for her, including ones by Sebastian Currier, Henri Dutilleux, Sofia Gubaidulina, Witold Lutos?awski, Norbert Moret, Krzysztof Penderecki, André Previn, Wolfgang Rihm, and John Williams.

Jean Sibelius, born Johan Julius Christian Sibelius, was a Finnish composer and violinist of the late Romantic and early-modern periods. He is widely recognized as his country's greatest composer and, through his music, is often credited with having helped Finland to develop a national identity during its struggle for independence from Russia.

Edward "Teddy" Paul Maxwell Abrams is an American conductor, pianist, clarinetist, and composer. He is currently Music Director of The Louisville Orchestra and Britt Festival Orchestra.

Dr. Seuss' How the Grinch Stole Christmas! The Musical, or simply How the Grinch Stole Christmas! The Musical, is a seasonal musical adaptation of the Dr. Seuss book How the Grinch Stole Christmas!.

John Towner Williams is an American composer, conductor, pianist and trombonist. In a career that has spanned nearly seven decades, he has composed some of the most popular, recognizable, and critically acclaimed film scores in cinematic history. Williams has won 25 Grammy Awards, seven British Academy Film Awards, five Academy Awards, and four Golden Globe Awards. With 52 Academy Award nominations, he is the second most-nominated individual, after Walt Disney. His compositions are considered the epitome of film music. In 2005, the American Film Institute selected Williams's score to 1977's Star Wars as the greatest film score of all time. The Library of Congress also entered the Star Wars soundtrack into the National Recording Registry for being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".

The San Francisco Symphony, founded in 1911, is an American orchestra based in San Francisco, California. Since 1980, the orchestra is resident at the Louise M. Davies Symphony Hall in the City's Hayes Valley neighborhood. The San Francisco Symphony Youth Orchestra and the San Francisco Symphony Chorus are part of the organization. Since 1995, Michael Tilson Thomas has been the orchestra's music director. Tilson Thomas is scheduled to conclude his tenure as the orchestra's music director in 2020, when Esa-Pekka Salonen is scheduled to become the orchestra's next music director.

Final Fantasy is a media franchise created by Hironobu Sakaguchi and owned by Square Enix that includes video games, motion pictures, and other merchandise. The original Final Fantasy video game, published in 1987, is a role-playing video game developed by Square, spawning a video game series that became the central focus of the franchise. The primary composer of music for the main series was Nobuo Uematsu, who single-handedly composed the soundtracks for the first nine games, as well as directing the production of many of the soundtrack albums. Music for the spin-off series and main series games beginning with Final Fantasy X was created by a variety of composers including Masashi Hamauzu, Naoshi Mizuta, Hitoshi Sakimoto, and Kumi Tanioka, as well as many others.

Esperanza Emily Spalding is an American jazz bassist, singer, songwriter, and composer. Her accolades include four Grammy Awards, a Boston Music Award, and a Soul Train Music Award.