A celebration of the 20th anniversary of Metallica’s groundbreaking S&M concerts and album recorded with the San Francisco Symphony as legendary conductor Michael Tilson Thomas leads a portion of the show, kicking off his final season in San Francisco. Recorded live on September 6th and 8th.

Mahler's Symphony No.1 by Michael Tilson Thomas and the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra including selected movements of the fifth, seventh and ninth symphonies and the complete Songs of a Wayfarer with baritone Thomas Hampson.

Shostakovich may have secreted a subversive cipher beneath the surface of his life-saving Symphony No. 5. This is all the more shocking since another bad review from Stalin’s totalitarian forces could have meant a sentence to the Gulag or worse.... When he penned this fifth symphony, the composer was literally writing for his life. The risk was so high that Shostakovich slept on the stairs outside his apartment so the secret police would not wake his family when they came from him, as he was sure they would. This Keeping Score episode, investigates the arresting symphony that would either redeem Shostakovich or doom him. Did he dare hide a kernel of musical criticism in what appears to be a paean to the Motherland? Join Michael Tilson Thomas and the San Francisco Symphony as they explore the hidden language of this masterwork. Episode includes full-length concert performance of Dimitri Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 5 in D minor by the San Francisco Symphony.

In 1827, Berlioz saw Harriet Smithson for the first time, playing Ophelia in a production of Hamlet. Hopelessly smitten, he turned his entire life upside down to meet her. Frantic months turned into years when he suddenly heard rumors about Harriet and another man. Believing himself cured, he wrote a ‘fantastic’ symphony complete with a special theme, the idée fixe, to represent his former obsession.

Beethoven spent three years composing the Eroica, an intimate journal of his emotional crises and his dramatic emergence as an original master. Michael Tilson Thomas and the musicians of the San Francisco Symphony help you make sense of this voyage into life as it really is.

In July of 2001, the concert edition of Stephen Sondheim's Broadway masterpiece, Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, was presented at San Francisco's famed Davies Symphony Hall, with Patti LuPone and George Hearn starring. The world-class San Francisco Symphony, under the direction of Rob Fisher, provided the accompaniment for this powerful, sold-out concert.

A live Metallica concert backed by a 80 piece symphony orchestra, conducted by Michael Kamen. Two songs are debuted, "- Human" and "No Leaf Clover." A documentary is included. It also was released on audio CD.

How can marks on a 150‐year‐old page transform into the unflinching emotion of Tchaikovsky's 4th Symphony? From decoding the score, to uncovering Tchaikovsky's history, Michael Tilson Thomas gives us a backstage pass to the making of a performance.

Michael Tilson Thomas and the San Francisco Symphony rehearse and perform Stravinsky's Rite of Spring.