As a contemporary composer who also happens to be one of his generation’s finest interpreters of the legacy repertoire, the San Francisco Symphony’s music director Esa-Pekka Salonen moves between blue-chip classics and ambitious contemporary scores more smoothly than many peers. The discovery this time is the world premiere of a commissioned piano concerto by the prolific Swedish composer Anders Hillborg, whom Salonen has championed for years. Emanuel Ax, an Olympian interpreter of the canonical repertoire, is the distinguished soloist. To set the stage, Salonen has chosen the stirring Variations on a Theme of Joseph Haydn by Johannes Brahms. For the kicker, he’s got the once-provocative Symphony No. 2 of Ludwig van Beethoven, dismissed by an uncomprehending wordsmith of the composer’s time as “a hideously writhing, wounded dragon that refuses to die, but writhing in its last agonies and, in the fourth movement, bleeding to death.” —Matthew Gurewitsch