San Francisco Symphony; Esa-Pekka Salonen, conductor

The San Francisco Symphony returns to Berkeley with music director Esa-Pekka Salonen. Their concert features the world premiere of a new work by Jens Ibsen, the most recent winner of the Emerging Black Composers Project, a collaboration with the San Francisco Conservatory of Music to foster the creation and performance of new music from early-career Black American composers. Ibsen focuses a wide range of life experience and influences into his music—he’s a classically trained, Ghana-born metalhead who sang as a principal soloist in the Vienna Boys Choir. In this performance, Salonen also conducts the orchestra in his own Kínēma, a showcase for principal clarinetist Carey Bell; and Stravinsky’s Symphony in Three Movements.