SFS Chorus
Established in 1972 at the request of Seiji Ozawa, then the San Francisco Symphony’s (SFS) Music Director, the 140-member Chorus, made up of 30 paid and 110 volunteer singers, gives a minimum of 26 performances each season and has sung under the world’s major conductors, including SFS Music Director Michael Tilson Thomas (MTT), SFS Conductor Laureate Herbert Blomstedt, Kurt Masur, Neville Marriner, Roger Norrington, Yuri Temirkanov, Wolfgang Sawallisch, and Robert Shaw. Louis Magor served as the Chorus’s Director during its first decade. In 1982 Margaret Hillis, then the world-renowned Director of the Chicago Symphony Chorus, assumed the ensemble’s leadership, and the following year Vance George was named Director, serving through the 2005-06 season. Ragnar Bohlin assumed the position of Chorus Director in March 2007. The SFS Chorus’s excellence has been recognized with four Grammy Awards, including Best Performance of a Choral Work for Orff’s Carmina burana, the Symphony’s first Grammy, Best Choral Performance, for Brahms’s German Requiem; and Classical Album of the Year, for their performance of Perséphone as part of a collection of Stravinsky’s music that also included The Firebird and Le Sacre du printemps. The 2003 SFS Media recording of Mahler’s Symphony No. 3, featuring the women of the Chorus, won a Grammy Award for Best Classical Album. The Chorus is also featured on recordings with the SFS under Michael Tilson Thomas’s direction in Ives’s An American Journey, Mahler’s Symphony No. 2, Das klagende Lied, Mahler’s Symphony No. 8, Symphony of a Thousand, and selections from Berlioz’s Lélio. The Chorus may be heard under the direction of Conductor Laureate Herbert Blomstedt in Grieg’s incidental music for Peer Gynt, the Grammy-nominated Mahler Symphony No. 2, and a collection of choral works by Brahms. Christmas by the Bay, released in 1998 on the Delos label was nominated for a Grammy in the Best Classical Crossover category. In March 2001, Delos Records released the Chorus’s second solo recording, Voices 1900/2000, a choral journey through the 20th century. The Chorus has also recorded John Adams’s Harmonium twice, on ECM under Edo de Waart’s direction, and on Nonesuch with the composer conducting. In February 2004 the Chorus recorded Gordon Getty’s Annabel Lee and Young America with MTT and the Orchestra in live concerts for inclusion in a PentaTone Classics disc of Getty choral works. The Chorus has been heard on the soundtracks of the films Amadeus, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, and Godfather III and on the video/DVD release of the Emmy-winning Sweeney Todd with the SFS. In February 2001, the Chorus made its Carnegie Hall debut in two sold-out performances of Mahler and Stravinsky with MTT and the SFS. The Chorus recorded with the SFS on Jerod Impichchaachaaha’ Tate’s Tracing Mississippi and Iholba’ 2008 release for Thunderbird Records. The Chorus is also featured in the second season of Keeping Score in Ives’ Holidays Symphony. The episode is scheduled to air on PBS in October 2009.
For information on how to audition for the Symphony Chorus, call the Chorus Office at (415) 503-5207.
View the Chorus roster.