The San Francisco Symphony has unveiled a stacked and star-studded 2021-22 season, the first full campaign under new music director Esa-Pekka Salonen, featuring more than 220 live and virtual performances designed, as CEO Mark C. Hanson describes it, to “reimagine how people everywhere engage with music in deep and meaningful ways.”

The new season, which kicks off Oct. 1, offers a multitude of works and performers new to SF Symphony audiences and features frequent appearances by artists named to Salonen’s Collaborative Partners team. The partners — including such renowned music stars as soprano Julia Bullock, bassist and vocalist Esperanza Spalding, guitarist and songwriter Bryce Dessner (of the folk-rock band The National), and composer Nico Muhly, among others — will be cast in full orchestral settings, recitals, as part of the edgy SoundBox concert series and in virtual programming.

But the classics will be well-represented too, including a deep dive into the music of Igor Stravinsky and a series of concerts devoted to the Greek myth of Prometheus, featuring works by Beethoven, Liszt and Scriabin (whose “Prometheus, The Poem of Fire” will be performed by famed pianist Jean-Yves Thibaudet).

After a pandemic-plagued year when all arts groups had to adjust to presenting virtual and streaming works to a sheltering-at-home audience, Salonen noted that “we have to come to terms with another challenging prospect: that there is no getting back to ‘normal’ unless we attempt to redefine what it means.”

“The new ‘normal’ for us,” he added, “must be to push boundaries and explore the world around us with openness and curiosity. It’s up to us to make sure that this place is one where the act of creating art in one another’s presence continues to feel as precious and irreplicable as it has in the last year, while simultaneously reaching those previously out of reach through digital channels. I have complete faith that this organization will make that a reality.”

To that end, here are a few of the highlights of the 2021-22 season.

  • Salonen will direct what’s been dubbed Re-Opening night and week performances, and the Symphony’s annual opening night gala, with dinner and dancing, will return as a live event (Oct. 1). Guest artists include Spalding, a Collaborative Partner, and the Bay Area’s always adventurous Alonzo King LINES Ballet.
  • Salonen and the orchestra will present several concerts over the course of the season exploring the music of Igor Stravinsky, including a semi-staged performance of the opera “Oedipus Rex” and of “Symphony of Psalms,” led by famed stage director Peter Sellars ; performances of “The Rite of Spring” and the composer’s Violin Concerto, featuring guest soloist Leila Josefowicz; and a digital production of “The Soldier’s Tale,” directed by Netia Jones.
  • Salonen will conduct the U.S. premiere of Dessner’s Violin Concerto, a Symphony commission and featuring guest soloist Pekka Kuusisto, a Collaborative Partner (Oct. 21-23).
  • Another Collaborative Partner, flutist and experimental music champion Claire Chase, is a featured performer as the orchestra tackles Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho’s 2001 work “Aile du songe.”
  • Bullock will present a new version of her “History’s Persistent Voice,” a program she created responding to art and literary works by Black American artists and centerpieced by two new San Francisco Symphony commissions (May 17, 2022).
  • Music director emeritus Michael Tilson Thomas, whose grand sendoff by the Symphony was scuttled by the pandemic, will return to direct four weeks of concerts, overseeing such works as Copland’s “Appalachian Spring,” Mahler’s Symphony No. 1, Prokofiev’s Symphony No. 5, Schumann’s Symphony No. 1, William Grant “Still’s Patterns,” his own composition “Notturno” and a world premiere of “Concerto for Trombone,” written by Symphony principal trombonist Timothy Higgins.
  • The orchestra’s annual Great Performers Series includes guest appearance from such stars as the Academy of St Martin in the Fields and Joshua Bell, Ray Chen, Hélène Grimaud, Sheku Kanneh-Mason with Isata Kanneh-Mason, Evgeny Kissin, Lang Lang, Itzhak Perlman and Yuja Wang.
  • Mezzo-soprano Sasha Cooke, a Bay Area favorite, joins with pianist Kirill Kuzman in a concert titled “How Do I Find You,” consisting of 17 world premieres written for Cooke during the pandemic (Jan. 30).
  • Two other world premieres slated for the season are the Symphony co-commissioned “Song of the Flaming Phoenix,” a new concerto for sheng (Chinese mouth organ) by Fang Man, and featuring by Wu Wei; and John Corigliano’s Saxophone Concerto, a Symphony commission featuring Timothy McAllister.

Subscription packages — $240-$1,800 for main orchestra performance series, with a wide variety of specialized packages available — went on sale this week. Individual tickets will go on sale at a later date. Contact 415-864-6000, www.sfsymphony.org/subscribe.