Countering your Tom Cruise, Mark Cuban and John McCain for the short list of American mavericks, MTT and the SF Symphony offer their own selection: Aaron Copland, Lou Harrison, Charles Ives, in the first concert of their festival dedicated to the trail blazers of American music. If that concert last night was any indication, go buy yourself a pass to the rest of the concerts, which includes world premieres by Mason Bates, John Adams, Meredith Monk performed by Jessye Norman, Emanuel Ax, Jeremy Denk or the St Lawrence string quartet: you're in for an ear opening experience.

For the first concert, MTT kept is (relatively) classical, with only 20th century works, to ease us into the flow. He opened with Copland's orchestral variations, an orchestration of one of the 20th century major American piano pieces, his Piano variations. The second half featured Henry Brant's orchestration of the other major American piano piece, Ive's Concord Sonata. Copland's orchestral variations were a commission by the city of Louisville which in a period of twelve years surrounding the fifties, asked composers to create 120 pieces of orchestral music and several operas from the likes of Elliott Carter, Lou Harrison, Bohuslav Martinu, Lukas Foss, Arthur Honegger. And Copland. The odds of this ever happening at that scale again -public funding going to the arts, are you insane?!?- are so slim, there's even a movie about the Louisville project, Music makes a city.