The San Francisco Symphony is among the country's leading orchestras, with a reputation for adventurous and innovative programming that highlights American composers, focusing on targeting new audiences for orchestral music. Under the direction of long-time music director Michael Tilson Thomas, the San Francisco Symphony developed a world-class reputation for its performances and recordings. In 2021, the orchestra, under Tilson Thomas, was heard on an SFS Media recording of orchestral music by Alban Berg.

The San Francisco Musical Association, established in 1908, founded the San Francisco Symphony, which gave its first concert in 1911. Its early conductors included Henry Hadley and Alfred Hertz. After the orchestra had to cancel its 1934 season for financial reasons, the city ratified an amendment to its charter in 1935, establishing municipal funding for the orchestra. That year, Pierre Monteux was named music director, and under his leadership, the orchestra grew substantially in stature and reputation, making its first national tour and over 40 recordings for RCA. Some of the world's leading conductors have served the orchestra, including Seiji Ozawa, Edo de Waart, and Herbert Blomstedt. In 1980, during de Waart's tenure, the orchestra moved from the War Memorial Opera House, where it had performed since 1932, into the Louise M. Davis Symphony Hall. That same year, it expanded its season to 52 weeks and inaugurated its New and Unusual Music Series, planned by composer John Adams, the orchestra's composer-in-residence, from 1979 until 1985.

In 1995, Michael Tilson Thomas became the orchestra's music director, bringing it to a new level of prominence through its local performances, national and international tours, and many recordings and broadcasts. The orchestra offers more than 220 concerts and other presentations annually, reaching audiences of nearly 600,000 locally and through its tours. The orchestra significantly increased its recording schedule under Tilson Thomas' leadership and founded its own label in 2001, SFS Media. Since that time, it has recorded all of Mahler's symphonic works, including works voice and chorus. The orchestra's discography is broadly diverse but has focused on the music of the Romantic and late-Romantic eras, Russian music, and 20th and 21st century American music.

The orchestra is committed to an ambitious program of education. In 2006, Tilson Thomas and the San Francisco Symphony launched the Keeping Score PBS television series and multimedia project, a national program that aired for three seasons. The orchestra offers free community concerts in the Bay Area, plus professional coaching for student and amateur musicians, and its music education program, Adventures in Music, reaches all first- through fifth-grade students in the San Francisco Unified School District. Highlights of Tilson Thomas' tenure include a highly successful campaign to raise the orchestra's profile in San Francisco; a busy schedule of tours of the U.S., Europe, and Asia, including the group's first trip to China; a series of televised performances at the BBC Proms; and opening Carnegie Hall's 2008-2009 season with A Celebration of Leonard Bernstein, which was broadcast on PBS' Great Performances and released on DVD. It also presents semi-staged and multimedia productions, such as Britten's Peter Grimes and Rimsky-Korsakov's Mlada.

In 2020, Tilson Thomas concluded his tenure as music director, assuming the title of music director laureate, and Esa-Pekka Salonen became the orchestra's new music director. The San Francisco Symphony has garnered an impressive collection of honors for its recordings, including the Grand Prix du Disque, a Gramophone Award, and a slew of Grammy Awards, including one in 2021 for its recording of Tilson Thomas' From the Diary of Anne Frank and Meditations on Rilke. That year, it issued a recording of Alban Berg's Violin Concerto, Seven Early Songs, and Three Pieces for Orchestra, with Tilson Thomas conducting. ~ Stephen Eddins & Keith Finke

Conductor Herbert Blomstedt is a member of the top rank of modern conductors, having held long-term music directorships in both Europe and the U.S. Specializing in Romantic and early 20th century repertory, he has recorded a substantial body of work and has remained active into great old age.

Blomstedt was born on July 11, 1927, in Springfield, Massachusetts, but his parents were Swedish, and they returned to their home country when Blomstedt was four. He grew up partly in Finland. His mother gave him piano lessons, and he took courses at the Royal College of Music in Stockholm while pursuing a general degree at the University of Uppsala. Drawn to conducting, he traveled to Paris for lessons with Igor Markevitch. This phase of Blomstedt's education laid the groundwork for his later versatility as a conductor as he studied contemporary music in the fertile city of Darmstadt in 1949, took pioneering classes in Baroque music with Paul Sacher at the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis in Switzerland, and took lessons at the Juilliard School in New York with Jean Morel, and with Leonard Bernstein at the Tanglewood Festival in Massachusetts. Blomstedt's career was launched as he won the Koussevitsky Conducting Prize in 1953 and the Salzburg Conducting Competition in 1955. He made his professional debut in 1954 with the Stockholm Philharmonic and was appointed the music director of the Nörrkoping Symphony, where he remained through 1961. The first part of Blomstedt's career was marked by Scandinavian successes. He held the post of first conductor of the Oslo Philharmonic from 1962 to 1968 and was appointed music director of the Royal Danish Symphony in Copenhagen in 1967, remaining in that post until 1977. The musicians of the Staatskapelle Dresden in what was then East Germany invited him to become their music director in 1975, and his ten-year tenure there was marked by recordings and major tours through the East Bloc and beyond. Blomstedt became familiar to American audiences as the music director of the San Francisco Symphony, a position he assumed in 1985, surmounting difficulties that arose as the orchestra was split into two parts. In 1995, Blomstedt returned to Europe as the music director of the NDR Symphony in Hamburg, moving three years later to the same post with the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra. His long career brought him a profusion of guest conducting opportunities, and he has amassed an impressive collection of conductor laureate posts, remaining active into old age. A member of the Seventh-Day Adventist church, Blomstedt does not rehearse on Friday nights or Saturdays, but he does conduct, interpreting performances as expressions of religious devotion.

Blomstedt's recording catalog is vast, comprising well over 125 albums, including many from the LP era; many of the latter have been reissued in digital form. His repertory runs from Beethoven through the 19th century and well into the 20th, with special emphasis on the music of Carl Nielsen, Franz Berwald, and other Scandinavian composers. He has also recorded the symphonies of Bruckner at several points in his career. Blomstedt has remained active as a recording artist even after slowing his schedule of live performances. His recording of the Brahms Symphony No. 2 in D major, Op. 73, with the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, was released in 2021 when the conductor was 93. ~ James Manheim