San Francisco Symphony Music Director Michael Tilson Thomas announced the 2010-11 SFS concert season, the orchestra's 99th, earlier this week. The upcoming season will feature the return of composer John Adams, a longtime Bay Area resident and friend of the orchestra, who will be part of Project San Francisco, the annual SFS residency program featuring performance, educational, and community events. Adams launched his initial creative collaboration with the SFS as composer-in-residence back in 1982.

During his Project San Francisco programs next season, Adams will conduct the San Francisco Symphony in three performances of his multilingual Nativity oratorio, El Niño, December 2-4. The oratorio was composed in celebration of the millennium and commissioned by the SFS, which gave the piece its US premiere in 2001. These concerts will feature sopranos Dawn Upshaw, one of El Niño’s original interpreters, and Jessica Rivera, mezzo-soprano Michelle DeYoung, countertenors Daniel Bubeck, Brian Cummings, and Steven Rickards, bass-baritone Jonathan Lemalu, and the San Francisco Symphony Chorus. The San Francisco Girls Chorus also performs.

During the second week of the focus on Adams, December 8-11, Michael Tilson Thomas will lead the orchestra in the composer’s 1985 SFS commission Harmonielehre. The composition was inspired by a dream Adams had in which he was driving across the Bay Bridge and saw an oil tanker on the surface of the water abruptly turn upright and take off like a rocket. The SFS performed the world premiere of Harmonielehre in March 1985 under the direction of then-music director Edo de Waart, the performers captured on the Nonesuch recording of the piece.

Finally, on December 12, musicians from the San Francisco Symphony will explore some of Adams's more intimate works in an SFS Chamber Music concert.

Since 1981, the San Francisco Symphony has performed 21 of Adams's works, six of which were SFS commissions. The orchestra has performed six world premieres of Adams’s music and four US premieres, including the March 2007 US premiere of his opera A Flowering Tree, a San Francisco Symphony co-commission. The orchestra has also commissioned Adams to write a work for its centennial season in 2011-12.

For further details on these concerts and the rest of the SFS 2010-11 season, visit sfsymphony.org. For more information on upcoming performances featuring John Adams, including next week's John Adams Focus events at the Barbican in London, visit nonesuch.com/on-tour.