Daniel Stewart joined the San Francisco Symphony as Wattis Foundation Music Director of the San Francisco Symphony Youth Orchestra (SFSYO) in the 2019–20 season. He also currently serves as Music Director of the Santa Cruz Symphony, and has conducted the San Francisco Symphony, Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, Boston Symphony Orchestra, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Houston Symphony, Saint Louis Symphony, hr-Sinfonieorchester, Frankfurt Opera-Orchestra, and Boston Ballet, among others. 
 
Under his artistic leadership, the Santa Cruz Symphony has seen unprecedented growth and earned a reputation for innovative programming, frequent collaborations with leading international artists such as Yuja Wang and more than twenty principal singers from the Metropolitan Opera, and attracting exceptional talent to its ranks. 
 
In 2012, the Metropolitan Opera appointed Stewart the first conductor of their Lindemann Young Artist Development Program. In 2013, he made his Lincoln Center debut in a Metropolitan Opera-produced concert of scenes from comic operas by Stravinsky, Mozart, Donizetti, and Berlioz. During his tenure with the Metropolitan Opera, he coached singers and conducted the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra and soloists in a comprehensive range of the operatic repertory. 

He has worked closely with contemporary composers such as Esa-Pekka Salonen, Thomas Adès, Mason Bates, John Adams, HK Gruber, and the late Karlheinz Stockhausen. Stewart’s own compositions have been performed at the Aspen Music Festival, Tribeca New Music Festival, and the Verbier Festival. 
 
A San Francisco native, Stewart is a graduate of the Curtis Institute of Music, where he studied conducting with Otto-Werner Mueller. He has also studied with Michael Tilson Thomas, Simon Rattle, Christoph Eschenbach, and Alan Gilbert. In 2010, Stewart was awarded the Aspen Music Festival's James Conlon conducting prize. Previously a member of the SFSYO and a substitute violist for the San Francisco Symphony, he has concertized frequently as a viola soloist, and served as principal violist of numerous ensembles, including the New World Symphony, Schleswig-Holstein Festival Orchestra, and the Verbier Festival and Chamber Orchestras. He has recorded for EMI with Maxim Vengerov, and toured extensively in more than forty countries. 

Dec 2022

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.