The San Francisco Symphony Chorus was established in 1973 at the request of Seiji Ozawa, then the Symphony’s Music Director. The Chorus, numbering 32 professional and more than 120 volunteer members, now performs more than 26 concerts each season. Louis Magor served as the Chorus’s director during its first decade. In 1982 Margaret Hillis assumed the ensemble’s leadership, and the following year Vance George was named Chorus Director, serving through 2005–06. Ragnar Bohlin concluded his tenure as Chorus Director in 2021, a post he had held since 2007. Jenny Wong was named Chorus Director in September 2023.

The Chorus can be heard on many acclaimed San Francisco Symphony recordings and has received Grammy Awards for Best Performance of a Choral Work (for Orff’s Carmina burana, Brahms’s German Requiem, and Mahler’s Symphony No. 8) and Best Classical Album (for a Stravinsky collection and for Mahler’s Symphony No. 3 and Symphony No. 8).

To view a San Francisco Symphony Chorus roster, click here.

Organist Jonathan Dimmock is the Principal Organist at the Legion of Honor Museum, Music Director at San Francisco’s Swedenborgian Church and Congregation Sherith Israel, and he regularly appears with the San Francisco Symphony. A graduate of Oberlin and Yale, he was the only American to serve as organ scholar of Westminster Abbey, under the tutelage of Simon Preston. Continuing his career in the United States, he served three Episcopal cathedrals: Saint John the Divine (New York), Saint Mark’s (Minneapolis), and Grace (San Francisco). Mr. Dimmock lives in San Francisco, where, for more than twelve years, he was music director at Saint Ignatius Church.

Mr. Dimmock has recorded more than fifty CDs; he can be heard on the San Francisco Symphony’s Grammy award-winning recording of Mahler’s Symphony No. 8, conducted by Michael Tilson Thomas on SFS Media. His teachers and mentors include Olivier Messiaen, Gillian Weir, Jean Langlais, Peter Hallock, Haskell Thomson, William Porter, Thomas Murray, Ton Koopman, Harald Vogel, Naji Hakim, and Frédéric Blanc.

Mr. Dimmock’s numerous blog writings, vocation as a teacher, passion for communicating, and his personal focus have been the impetus for his founding of five nonprofit organizations, including American Bach Soloists, Artists’ Vocal Ensemble (AVE), and, most recently, The Resonance Project, which uses live music to transform conflict and find common ground. Through this project he has interviewed some of the greatest musicians in the world, all of whom share his excitement about the interface between music and neuroscience. The project has garnered attention from the United Nations, the US Department of State, and former US President Barack Obama.  

A native of Bend, OR, trumpet player Dylan Girard is a performer, educator, and clinician based in the San Francisco Bay Area. Recent engagements include appearances with the San Francisco Opera, San Francisco Ballet, Utah Symphony, and Hawaii Symphony. Aside from classical music, he has shared the stage with Belle and Sebastian, played at Outside Lands, and been featured as a recording artist at Skywalker Sound Studios. An alumnus of the University of Oregon, New World Symphony, Verbier Festival, and Tanglewood Music Center, he is an instructor of trumpet at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music.

(December 2018)