Salonen Conducts Sibelius 7

Bookended by two spectacular Richard Strauss tone poems is the SF Symphony’s first commission from Gabriella Smith, reflecting her passion for climate action. Jean Sibelius’s final symphony, the Seventh, distills symphonic form to its bare essentials. Its musical ideas seem to self-generate from the raw thematic elements. This air of effortlessness was an illusion: he spent the better part of a decade writing and rewriting the single-movement work.