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The orchestra was founded in
the years after the 1906 San Francisco
earthquake with just 13 musicians and gave its first concert in 1911 in the
Cort Theater, Ellis Street, under the conductorship of Henry
Hadley. Alfred Hertz took over
the position and since him its acclaimed conductors and musical directors
have included Pierre Monteaux, Josef Krips, Leonard Bernstein, Sergei Prokofiev, Aaron
Copland, John Adams, Seiki Ozawa, Edo De Waart and the current holder of
the position, Michael Tilson Thomas.
Herbert Blomfeldt, who conducted for 10
years from 1985, is the Conductor Laureate. They have performed in concerts
worldwide and have made many award winning recordings including
Prokofiev's Romeo and Juliet
which won the 1997 Grammy Award for Best Orchestral Performance, a three
disc set of Stravinsky recordings which won three Grammy Awards in 2000 for
Best Classical Album, Best Orchestral Recording and Best Engineered Classical
Album, and a 1999 Grammy Award for Best Rock Instrumental Performance on The Call of Ktulu
with the rock group Metallica. They have also won further Grammy
Awards for Orff's Carmina Burana, Brahms' German Requiem, Bartok's Concerto for Orchestra as well as the French Grand Prix du Disque, Belgium's Caecilia
Prize and the British Gramophone Award for Nielsen's symphonies, the
Japanese Record Academy Award for Grieg's Peer Gynt and the German Preis der Deutschen Schallplattenkritik
for Mahler's Symphony No. 2
(which was also a Grammy Award nomination). Since 2001 they have had their own
recording label, SFS Media, and three of their releases have made it to the
top ten of the Billboard Classical Chart. The orchestra currently plays in
the Louis M. Davies Symphony Hall which was built in 1980 and was
previously housed in the War Memorial Opera House.
John Coolidge Adams Recordings
Shaker Loops - Hymning
Slews
Philips 475 7551 (CD: Steve Reich: Variations/ John Adams:
Shaker Loops)
Conductor - Edo de Waart
Sources:
http://www.sfsymphony.org/templates/history.asp?nodeid=151
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco_Symphony#History
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