Composer John Adams has teamed up with Toronto Symphony Orchestra Music Director Peter Oundjian for the orchestra's tenth-annual New Creations Festival, which begins this Saturday, March 1, and runs through Friday, March 7, in Toronto's Roy Thomson Hall. Over the past decade, the festival has featured artists from across Canada and the world, and premiered the works of emerging and renowned contemporary composers, not least Adams, who made his TSO debut in the 2011 New Creations Festival.

This year, John Adams returns with his music as a focus in the 2014 Festival. Opening the festival Saturday night, the TSO, led by Oundjian, performs Adams's Doctor Atomic Symphony on a program that also includes the world premiere of a TSO commission by Kevin Lau and the Canadian premiere of Magnus Lindberg's Piano Concerto No. 2, featuring pianist Yefim Bronfman.

On Wednesday, March 5, the composer himself leads the TSO in the Canadian premiere of his 1996 piece Slonimsky’s Earbox, which can be heard on the 2001 Nonesuch album Century Rolls. Also that evening, Oundjian leads the TSO in a piece by Daniel Bjarnason, and the Canadian premieres of a new work by Canadian composer Zosha Di Castri and Esa-Pekka Salonen's Violin Concerto, featuring Ontario-born violinist Leila Josefowicz, for whom the piece was written (and who can be heard on the first recording of Adams's Road Movies, released on Nonesuch in 2004).

Closing out the festival next Friday, March 7, Adams again leads the TSO in the Canadian premiere of one of his works, the 2011 piece Absolute Jest, featuring the St. Lawrence String Quartet, which gave its world premiere back in 2012. Early in the program, Oundjian leads the TSO in a piece by Vincent Ho and the world premiere of a TSO commission by Brian Current.

The festival also includes a number of pre-concert performances, intermission chats, and post-concert parties, as well as a free lunchtime performance of John Adams's Hallelujah Junction for two pianos in the Canadian Opera Company’s Richard Bradshaw Atrium on Tuesday, March 4.

All tickets to the New Creations Festival evening concerts are $14. For additional details and tickets, visit tso.ca. Adams, Oundjian, and other participants spoke with the Toronto Star about the festival in a feature you can read at thestar.com.

Coincidentally, the two Adams pieces receiving their Canadian premieres as part of the TSO's New Creations Festival are also being performed by the Orquesta Nacionales de España in Madrid tonight, as part of the composer's Carta Blanca residency there. The concert also includes a performance by Nonesuch label mate Jeremy Denk of Ravel's Piano Concert in G major.