Winner of the 2022 Sir Georg Solti Conducting Award, Earl Lee is in his second season as music director of the Ann Arbor Symphony and in his third season as assistant conductor of the Boston Symphony, which he has led in subscription concerts at Symphony Hall and Tanglewood. He was previously associate conductor of the Pittsburgh Symphony, resident conductor of the Toronto Symphony, and director of the Toronto Symphony Youth Orchestra and Pittsburgh Youth Symphony. He made his San Francisco Symphony debut in February 2022.

This past season, Mr. Lee’s guest conducting engagements included the Vancouver Symphony, Calgary Philharmonic, Winnipeg Symphony, Colorado Springs Philharmonic, and Florida Orchestra. He has also appeared with the New York Philharmonic, Seoul Philharmonic, Hawaii Symphony, Edmonton Symphony, Mostly Mozart Festival Orchestra, and Sejong Soloists. In 2022, he led Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw Orchestra as a participant in the Ammodo masterclasses led by Fabio Luisi.

As a cellist, Mr. Lee has performed at Marlboro Music Festival, Music from Angel Fire, Caramoor Rising Stars, and Ravinia’s Steans Institute, and has toured as a member of the East Coast Chamber Orchestra, Musicians from Marlboro, and with Gary Burton and Chick Corea as a guest member of the Harlem String Quartet.

Mr. Lee was the recipient of the Heinz Unger Award from the Ontario Arts Council, a Solti Career Assistance Award, a Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy Scholarship by Kurt Masur, and the Ansbacher Fellowship by the American Austrian Foundation and members of the Vienna Philharmonic. He studied cello at the Curtis Institute of Music and the Juilliard School, and conducting at Manhattan School of Music and New England Conservatory. He lives in New York with his wife and their daughter.

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.