Last year, Daniel Hope appeared with a quintet from San Francisco’s New Century Chamber Orchestra (NCCO) on Everybody’s Live with John Mulaney, the live weekly Netflix talk show, and this spring he leads the orchestra from the violin on two Bay Area tours. At concerts in Berkeley (March 13), San Francisco (March 14), and Belvedere Tiburon (March 15), they give the world premiere of Bubble Chamber, a new NCCO commission from San Francisco composer Nathaniel Stookey, best-known for The Composer Is Dead, one of the 21st century’s most performed works. This will be heard alongside an earlier NCCO commission from another San Francisco native – Overture by Jake Heggie, Musical America’s Composer of the Year 2025; Tchaikovsky’s Souvenir de Florence; and, with Hope as soloist, the Second Violin Concerto by French polymath Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges.

Hope and the orchestra complete their season in collaboration with Pablo Sáinz-Villegas, who joins them in Rohnert Park(April 23), Berkeley (April 24), and San Francisco (April 25) for guitar concertos by Joaquín Rodrigo and six-time Grammy winner Michael Daugherty. These share a program with music for strings by Argentina’s Alberto Williams and “new tango” master Astor Piazzolla, together with the world premiere of a new piece commissioned by the NCCO from Henry Dorn through the Emerging Black Composers Project.