About San Francisco Symphony
The San Francisco Symphony (the Symphony) is among the most adventurous and innovative arts institutions in the United States, celebrated for its artistic excellence, creative performance concepts, award-winning recordings, and standard-setting education and community engagement programs. Since it was established in 1911, the Symphony has grown in acclaim under a succession of distinguished music directors: Henry Hadley, Alfred Hertz, Basil Cameron, Issay Dobrowen, Pierre Monteux, Enrique Jordá, Josef Krips, Seiji Ozawa, Edo de Waart, Herbert Blomstedt, Michael Tilson Thomas, and Esa-Pekka Salonen.
The San Francisco Symphony presents more than 200 concerts and presentations annually for an audience of nearly 350,000 in its home of Davies Symphony Hall. A cornerstone of the organization’s mission, the San Francisco Symphony provides some of the most extensive education and community programs offered by any American orchestra. The Symphony's free music education experiences engage students in grades 1–12 throughout the San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD), serving more than 25,000 students annually.
In 2001, the Symphony became the first American orchestra to launch its own in-house record label SFS Media. Recorded live in concert and engineered at Davies Symphony Hall, SFS Media recordings showcase music by American composers as well as core classical masterworks. San Francisco Symphony radio broadcasts, the first in the nation to feature symphonic music when they began in 1926, today carry the Symphony’s concerts across the country. In 2004, the Symphony launched the groundbreaking multimedia Keeping Score series on PBS-TV and the web; the series was made available for unlimited free streaming on the Symphony’s YouTube channel in 2020. In 2014, the San Francisco Symphony inaugurated SoundBox, an experimental and eclectic live music series, which takes place in an alternative performance space located backstage at Davies Symphony Hall. For its adventurous programming, the Symphony has been honored 19 times by the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers, and the Symphony’s recordings have garnered France’s Grand Prix du Disque and Britain’s Gramophone Award, as well as 17 Grammy® Awards.
