This season mezzo-soprano MELODY WILSON makes her role debut with Baltimore Concert Opera as Principessa di Bouillon in Adriana Lecouvreur and appears with the Oakland Symphony singing Paul Moravec’s Sanctuary Road. Next summer, she performs Ludwig van Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Coronation Mass in Vienna. She makes her San Francisco Symphony debut with these performances.

Ms. Wilson has performed with Seattle Opera in recital and as Olga in Eugene Onegin, Opera Theatre of Saint Louis and Opera Delaware in multiple roles, Indianapolis Opera as Suzuki in Madama Butterfly, and Cincinnati Opera as Mercédès in Carmen. On the concert stage, she has appeared with the Slovak State Philharmonic, Hartford Symphony, and Kalamazoo Symphony, as well as at the Wilmington Jazz Festival, the US Embassy in Bratislava, the Weidner Center for the Performing Arts at the University of Wisconsin—Green Bay, and the Barocksaal in Vienna.

Ms. Wilson is a five-time recipient of the Jessye Norman Fellowship and a winner of the Gabriela Beňačková Competition in Prague and the International Czech and Slovak Competition. She holds degrees in music and Spanish from the University of Delaware and a Master of Music and Artist Diploma from the University of Michigan, where she studied with Shirley Verrett and George Shirley.

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.