California is home to two of America's great orchestras - the San Francisco Symphony and the LA Philharmonic, under the direction of two of today's most exciting and innovative conductors: Michael Tilson Thomas

and Esa Pekka-Salonen. Both orchestras welcomed the new year with excellent and diverse musical programmes featuring as guest performers some of today's most talented artists (see MusicPlanner for listing of the season's programmes).

But for Californians, January was an even more special month for orchestral music. The state played host to the New York Philharmonic, with the venerable Kurt Masur conducting.

This great orchestra, America's oldest symphony, last visited California in 1986. In January 1999, they were hosted by the San Francisco Symphony in the north and by the Philharmonic Society of Orange County in the southland. The audiences expected the big sound and they got it - at the Orange County Center for the Performing Arts, it was in the form of the lush, magnificent orchestration of two of Richard Strauss' tone poems: Don Juan and Death and Transfiguration; at San Francisco's Davies Symphony Hall, it was in the form of Beethoven's powerful and ever popular Symphony No. 5. For the finale, the orchestra delivered a virtuosic performance of one of Dmitri Shostakovich's Symphony No. 5 in D minor, one of the great Russian composer's best known works. Needless to say, whether heard in the north or in the southland, it was world-class all the way!