Contact : Stephanie Janes, (617) 598-3240, sj@celebrityseries.org
High-resolution photos: http://celebrityseries.org/Photo_Galleries/1512-SFS-Gallery.htm
Celebrity Series Press Room: http://www.celebrityseries.org/CS_aboutus/press.htm
Gary Dunning, President and Executive Director
Sunday, November 16, 2014, 5pm — Symphony Hall
(Boston) Celebrity Series of Boston will present San Francisco Symphony with conductor Michael
Tilson Thomas and violin soloist Gil Shaham on Sunday, November 16, 2014 at 5pm at Symphony
Hall, 301 Massachusetts Avenue, Boston, MA. Media partner is 99.5 WCRB.
Tickets start at $45 and are available online at www.celebrityseries.org
, by calling CelebrityCharge at
(617) 482-6661 Monday-Friday 10:00 a.m.- 4:00 p.m., or at the Symphony Hall Box Office, 301
Massachusetts Avenue, Boston.
This performance marks San Francisco Symphony’s seventh performance with Celebrity Series. It debuted in 1983 and last performed with the Celebrity Series in 2004. This performance marks Michael
Tilson Thomas’s fourth time performing with the Celebrity Series and Gil Shaham’s fifth.
Michael Tilson Thomas (MTT) celebrates his 20th season as Music Director of the San Francisco
Symphony (SFS) during the Orchestra’s 2014-15 season. MTT is currently the longest-tenured music director at any major American orchestra, and has surpassed Pierre Monteux as the longest-tenured
San Francisco Symphony Music Director. MTT assumed his post as the SFS’s 11th Music Director in
September 1995, consolidating a strong relationship with the Orchestra that began two decades earlier with his SFS debut at age 29, leading the Orchestra in Mahler’s Symphony No. 9.
MTT’s recordings have won numerous awards, including 12 Grammy Awards for SFS recordings. For the San Francisco Symphony’s own SFS Media label, Tilson Thomas and the Orchestra recorded all of
Mahler’s symphonies and his works for voices, chorus, and orchestra. Other significant recent recordings include Ives’ A Concord Symphony , arranged by Henry Brant; Copland’s Organ Symphony with Paul Jacobs; and most recently Beethoven’s Symphonies Nos. 2, 5, 7 and 9 and his Cantata on the Death of Emperor Joseph II and Piano Concerto No. 4, with soloist Emanuel Ax.
A Los Angeles native, Tilson Thomas began his studies at the USC, where he studied piano with John
Crown and conducting and composition with Ingolf Dahl. At 19, he was named Music Director of the
(more)

Celebrity Series of Boston
San Francisco Symphony press release, Page 2 of 3
Young Musicians Foundation Debut Orchestra and worked with Stravinsky, Boulez, Stockhausen, and
Copland on premieres of their works at Los Angeles’s famed Monday Evening Concerts.
At age 24, after winning the Koussevitzky Prize at Tanglewood, Tilson Thomas was appointed
Assistant Conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra (BSO) and made his New York debut when he replaced Music Director William Steinberg mid-concert at Lincoln Center. He was later appointed
Principal Guest Conductor of the BSO, where he remained until 1974. He led the television broadcasts of the New York Philharmonic’s famed Young People’s Concerts from 1971 to 1977. He has also served as Chief Conductor and Director of the Ojai Festival, Music Director of the Buffalo Philharmonic, and a Principal Guest Conductor of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. He has toured the world with the
London Symphony Orchestra, of which he became Principal Conductor in 1988 and now serves as
Principal Guest Conductor. Until 2000 he was co-Artistic Director of the Pacific Music Festival, which he and Leonard Bernstein inaugurated in Sapporo, Japan, in 1990. His guest conducting engagements include frequent appearances with the major orchestras of Europe and the United States.
In 1987 he founded the New World Symphony (NWS) in Miami, and continues as Artistic Director. As
Artistic Director of the YouTube Symphony Orchestra, MTT led the globally-sourced ensemble in both its first concert in 2009 at Carnegie Hall and the new group of musicians who performed at the Sydney
Opera House in 2011. That event was the most popular live YouTube concert, with 33 million viewers.
MTT and the SFS created the acclaimed national Keeping Score PBS TV series and multimedia project, unprecedented among American orchestras. Keeping Score is anchored by eight composer documentaries and live concert films, viewed by more than six million Americans on PBS television and
DVD; an interactive web site to explore and learn about music, and a national radio series.
Acclaimed for his work as a composer, MTT has given world premieres of many of his works with the
SFS. In 1999, MTT conducted the SFS in the first orchestral version of Three Songs to Poems by Walt
Whitman, and in 2001, Renée Fleming and the SFS premiered his song cycle Poems of Emily
Dickinson . In 2002, Tilson Thomas led the world premiere of his contrabassoon concerto Urban
Legend , with SFS contrabassoonist Steven Braunstein. In 1991, Tilson Thomas and the New World
Symphony performed From the Diary of Anne Frank, commissioned by UNICEF. His composition
Shówa/Shoáh was written in commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima.
Tilson Thomas’s honors include the National Medal of Arts, presented by President Barack Obama in
2010. He has also been recognized with Co lumbia University’s Ditson Award for services to American
Music and the President’s Award from the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences. He was named 1995 Conductor of the Year by Musical America. Tilson Thomas was a Carnegie Hall
Perspectives Artist from 20032005. In 2006 he was recognized with Gramophone’s Artist of the Year award, and was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Tilson Thomas is a Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres of France.
Violinist Gil Shaham was named Musical America ’s “Instrumentalist of the Year” in 2012, and is regularly sought after for concerto appearances with leading orchestras and conductors. He routinely gives recitals and ensemble appearances on the great concert stages and at the most prestigious festivals. Shaham was born in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, in 1971, and later moved with his parents to
Israel, where he began violin studies with Samuel Bernstein of the Rubin Academy of Music at the age of seven. In 1981, while studying with Haim Taub in Jerusalem, he made debuts with the Jerusalem
Symphony and the Israel Philharmonic. In 1982, after taking first prize in Israel’s Claremont
Competition, he became a scholarship student at Juilliard, where he worked with DeLay and Hyo Kang.
He also studied at Columbia University.

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Shaham has more than two dozen concerto and solo CDs, which have earned multiple Grammys, a
Grand Prix du Disque, Diapason d’Or, and Gramophone Editor’s Choice. His recent recordings are produced on the Canary Classics label, which he founded in 2004. They comprise Haydn Violin
Concertos and Mendelssohn’s Octet with Sejong Soloists; Sarasate: Virtuoso Violin Works with Adele
Anthony, Akira Eguchi and Orquesta Sinfónica de Castilla y León; Elgar’s Violin Concerto with the
Chicago Symphony Orchestra and David Zinman; The Butterfly Lovers and Tchaikovsky’s Violin
Concerto with the Singapore Symphony; Tchaikovsky’s Piano Trio in A with Yefim Bronfman and cellist
Truls Mork; The Prokofiev Album and Mozart in Paris , both with Orli Shaham; and The Fauré Album with Akira Eguchi and cellist Brinton Smith. Upcoming titles include Bach’s complete works for solo violin and several installments of the “Violin Concertos of the 1930s” project.
Shaham was awarded an Avery Fisher Career Grant in 1990, and in 2008 he received the coveted
Avery Fisher Prize. Shaham plays the 1699 “Countess Polignac” Stradivarius, and lives in New York
City with his wife, violinist Adele Anthony, and their three children.
Program:
LISZT
Mephisto Waltz No. 1
PROKOFIEV
Violin Concerto No. 2
SAMUEL CARL ADAMS
Drift and Providence
RAVEL
Daphnis et Chloé, Suite No. 2
About Celebrity Series of Boston
Celebrity Series of Boston was founded in 1938 by pianist and impresario Aaron Richmond. Over the course of its
76year history, Celebrity Series has presented an array of the world’s greatest performing artists, including
Sergei Rachmaninoff, Arturo Toscanini, Ignace Paderewski, Artur Rubenstein, Vladimir Horowitz, Glenn Gould,
Fritz Kreisler, Jascha Heifetz, Isaac Stern, Andrés Segovia, Kirsten Flagstad, Marian Anderson, Luciano
Pavarotti, Béla Bartók, Igor Stravinsky, Martha Graham, Ballet Russe De Monte Carlo, Mikhail Baryshnikov,
Mstislav Rostropovich, and the New York City Opera Company.
The Celebrity Series has been bringing the very best performers –from orchestras and chamber ensembles, vocal and piano music, to dance companies, jazz, and more –to Boston’s major concert halls for 76 years. The Celebrity
Series of Boston believes in the power of excellence and innovation in the performing arts to enrich life experiences, transform lives and build better communities. Through its education initiatives, the Celebrity Series seeks to build a community of Greater Boston where the performing arts are a valued, lifelong, shared experience –on stages, in schools, at home– everywhere. For more information on Celebrity Series of Boston, call
(617) 482-2595 or visit us online at www.celebrityseries.org
.
The Celebrity Series of Boston, Inc. receives generous support from Amy & Joshua Boger; Donna & Mike Egan;
Gabor Garai & Susan Pravda; David & Harriet Griesinger; Paul L. King; The Little Family Foundation; Susanne
Marcus Collins Foundation; Eleanor & Frank Pao; The John S. and Cynthia Reed Foundation; Sanjay & Sangeeta
Verma; Nancy Richmond Winsten; Charlesbank Capital Partners LLC; First Republic Bank; Foley & Lardner;
Massachusetts Cultural Council;The Peabody Foundation; PTC; Tufts Health Plan; The D.L. Saunders Real
Estate & Hotel Investment Group, AMO; Vertex Pharmaceuticals.
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