The SF Symphony returned from its trip to Europe and kicks off its 2007-08 season tonight, with a sold out opening night gala featuring MTT and Renée Fleming. We find it ironic that they will play Aaron Copland’s "Fanfare for the Common Man" -- a piece riddled with leftist political overtones -- to SF’s high society. Well then, it looks like the SF symphony is more subversive than we give them credit for this time. Good for them.

The season has plenty of highlights coming up, starting a week from today with Das Lied von der Erde, which will be recorded as part of the Mahler recording project, code named Mahtlert. The project originally focused on the symphonies, but Mahler wrote only nine and a half. They were quickly running out of material, so it has been expanded to include Das klagende Lied, the Rückert Lieder, Songs of a Wayfarer, songs from Des Knaben Wunderhorn, and MTT reading from the 1893 train schedule to Mahler’s vacation hut in Steinbach am Attersee. Next week’s soloist is the excellent baritone and an SF Opera Merola program alumni, Thomas Hampson.

Youtube clip of Gustavo Dudamel in the same program he'll conduct, with the same orchestra, on November 4th at Davies Symphony Hall.

Next month, the symphony season will have visits by Kurt Masur, Andras Schiff, or Pierre-Laurent Aimard, no small fry by any means. In November, we have the first of two visits by Gustavo Dudamel. The first one is with the Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra, a Venezuelan outfit. And that orchestra rocked the Proms concert series in London (and quite a few other cities as well) as seen in the aforementioned clip above. You MUST watch it. They’ll play the same program in Davies Symphony Hall, busting out Shostakovich then Latin-flavored tunes (listen to it here). Dudamel is all of 26, and has already inked a contract to become the next Music Director of the LA Symphony, succeeding Esa-Pekka Salonen, who will then becoming a full-time composer. Anyway, here comes your opportunity to see what the future of music looks like in SoCal.

Not too many world premieres this year, but plenty of modern works and pieces rarely heard by the symphony, including MTT’s own Notturno. We are looking forward to the Labèque sisters playing the SF premiere of Martinů’s Concerto for Two Pianos and String Orchestra.

Other big names gracing the stage: Deborah Voigt, who has never performed this side of grove st (she is another Merola alumni, and she opened the season last year for the Opera), Yefim Bronfman, the hardest working pianist in the business, Itzhak Perlman, conducting from his violin bow, Myung-Whun Chung, whom we now from his days as music director of Opera Bastille in Paris when we were a student there, Vladimir Ashkenazy, the newly named music director of the NY Philarmonic, Alan Gilbert, Charles Dutoit, pianists Hélène Grimaud, Nikolai Lugansky, Richard Goode, Murray Perahia, or Leif Ove Andsnes, violinists Gil Shaham and Vadim Repin.

For more info on the season, please check out the Symphony web site.