My summer at San Francisco Symphony, plus Rach 2 next spring
It's been too long since I last wrote to you, and I have a great deal to share. This has been one of the fullest and most rewarding stretches of music-making I can remember, with a great deal still ahead this summer. But let me begin with the performance I'm looking forward to most, even though it's still the better part of a year away.
The Piece I Can't Wait to Play Again
Next spring, on April 24, 2027, I'll perform Rachmaninoff's Second Piano Concerto with the San Francisco Philharmonic. It's a piece I've played some twenty times over the years, "Rach 2" to those of us who love it, and I can't wait to return to it once more.
People sometimes ask how that's possible: twenty performances of a single concerto, and still counting the days until the next. The answer is that I never play a piece the same way twice, and I wouldn't want to. When I return to a work I know by heart, my task is to go back and re-ask every question I asked the first time. Why did Rachmaninoff place this phrase here? Where does this harmony want to turn? And then I answer each of them anew. The notes on the page stay the same; what happens in the room never does.
That is the gift of the Second. It's a work an audience feels it knows before the first chord has landed: the famous bells of the opening, the long ache of the slow movement. And every time, there's something in it I hadn't found before. A great piece is never finished with you. This will be approximately my twenty-first time asking, and I already know it will have a new answer.
Music in the Mountains Festival Orchestra. Credit: B Douglas Jensen
Where I've Just Been
I had a reminder of exactly that only a few weeks ago. In June I returned to Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 23 with the Music in the Mountains Festival Orchestra, with my friend and colleague Ryan Murray on the podium. We first performed this concerto together just last summer, the weekend we met, and to return to it so soon is a rare privilege. It did not play the same way twice. I shared a brief moment from the performance, the passage where the piano and the woodwinds trade solos back and forth, and if you'd like to hear where it went this time, you can listen here:
Listen: Mozart 23 with Ryan Murray, live with the Music in the Mountains Festival Orchestra
This spring also brought something entirely different. For Amy Seiwert's new ballet Still Falling with Smuin Contemporary Ballet, I performed five of Brahms's solo piano works live across the full twenty-minute work, on a Steinway grand placed in the auditorium of the Cowell Theater, between the audience and the stage. There is nothing quite like playing while dancers move only inches away. The music stops being a solo and becomes a conversation, unfolding in real time almost like jazz: you catch a gesture from the corner of your eye, and a phrase you've played for years suddenly means something new. To be that close at once to the music, the dance, and the audience is a rare kind of privilege.
Smuin Contemporary Ballet: Credit: Maximillian Tortoriello
The Sound I Keep Coming Home To
If you've followed my playing for any length of time, you know where my heart lies: American music. Gershwin, Bernstein, Copland. Their music speaks to us directly as Americans, because the moment you hear it, something in you says, I knew that. I grew up with that. You hear it in jazz, you hear it in rock, it lives in the vernacular of our day. When I meet someone who has never heard American classical music in the concert hall, I ask them the same question: who did you grow up listening to? Because I promise you'll hear some of it in whatever I'm about to play. You always do.
A few years ago I had the honor of performing a suite from Copland's Appalachian Spring with the San Francisco Symphony and Michael Tilson Thomas. In that arrangement the piano doesn't enter at the opening, so I sat counting my forty-six measures of rest while the clarinet and strings built an ambient, aching world behind me. And for a moment I was no longer in Davies Hall. I was back in the Pocono Mountains where I grew up, watching a squirrel step onto a frost-tipped branch still wet with dew. It nearly moved me to tears, though I had a flurry of fast notes waiting for me. Behind me sat one of the great American orchestras, and for that moment I believe we all saw the same branch. That's the sound I keep returning to, and this summer it's everywhere I look.
A Summer at the San Francisco Symphony
Which brings me to the present. This is one of the busiest and most joyful summers I can remember, nearly all of it with the San Francisco Symphony, and much of it the kind of programming that shows how little truly separates American classical music from the music you already love.
I felt it just this past weekend at Stern Grove, where Béla Fleck played Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue on the banjo, every bit as inventive and joyful as it sounds, and a few nights earlier in Bernstein at his most electric, West Side Story. Thousands of people out on the grass, plenty of whom will tell you they don't go in for classical music, feeling the exact thing I feel every time I sit down at the instrument.
And the summer is only half over. A few evenings ahead I'd especially love for you to join me. On July 23 and 24, the music of James Bond. On July 25 and 26, we perform Matilda live to picture, with Danny DeVito narrating. On August 1, the songwriter Andrew Bird joins us. And in mid-August I head up to the Napa Valley for Music in the Vineyards. Someone arrives for Bond, or to hear Danny DeVito, not quite certain that classical music is meant for them, and leaves having felt the very thing I feel each time I sit down at the instrument. The full calendar and tickets are on my website, and I've gathered the highlights just below.
And I'm already looking past the summer. Next season brings a run of chamber concerts with the Symphony at Davies, among them Steve Reich's Double Sextet, an American masterpiece I can't wait to get my hands on. But more on all of that in the months to come.
It's good to be back in touch. Whether I see you at the Symphony this summer or you're marking your calendar for Rachmaninoff next spring, thank you for being part of all of it.
With gratitude,
John
Upcoming Appearances
July 23 & 24, 2026
San Francisco Symphony — The Music of James Bond
July 25 & 26, 2026
San Francisco Symphony with Danny DeVito, narrator — Matilda in Concert
August 1, 2026
San Francisco Symphony — Pops: Andrew Bird
August 13, 2026
Music in the Vineyards — Mixed Varietals
September 26 & 27, 2026
Marin Symphony Chamber Series — Brahms Piano Quartet in G minor & Schoenfeld's Café Music
November 1, 2026
San Francisco Symphony Chamber Series — Brahms Clarinet Trio, Op. 114
January 17, 2027
San Francisco Symphony Chamber Series — Brahms Horn Trio, Op. 40
April 24, 2027
San Francisco Philharmonic — Rachmaninoff Piano Concerto No. 2
June 20, 2027
San Francisco Symphony Chamber Series — Reich Double Sextet