Jonathan Cohen has forged a career as a conductor, cellist, and keyboardist. Known for his passion and commitment to chamber music, he is equally at home in such diverse activities as Baroque opera and the Classical symphonic repertoire. Beginning this season, he is the new artistic director of the Handel and Haydn Society in Boston, and he continues as artistic director of Arcangelo and Tetbury Festival in the UK, and as music director of Les Violons du Roy in Quebec. Throughout the 2023–24 season, Mr. Cohen continues to have a strong presence on both sides of the Atlantic. In Europe he conducts the Budapest Festival Orchestra, Basel Chamber Orchestra, Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France, Liège Royal Philharmonic, and Frankfurt Radio Symphony. In his first season at the Handel and Haydn Society, he leads Handel’s Israel in Egypt and Messiah. Projects with Les Violons du Roy include Bach’s Christmas Oratorio and a US tour. He makes his San Francisco Symphony debut with these performances.

Mr. Cohen founded Arcangelo in 2010. The ensemble became Wigmore Hall’s first Baroque ensemble in residence and has toured to the Berlin Philharmonie, Vienna Konzerthaus, Barbican Centre, Cologne Philharmonie, Salzburg Festival, MA Festival Bruges, and made three appearances at the BBC Proms. Arcangelo’s founding commitment to the recording studio has produced 28 critically lauded albums that have won multiple Gramophone Awards, an ECHO Klassik Award, a BBC Music Magazine Award, and a Grammy nomination.

Nicholas Phan has appeared with the Cleveland Orchestra, Boston Symphony, Chicago Symphony, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Philadelphia Orchestra, London Symphony, Los Angeles Opera, Houston Grand Opera, Glimmerglass, Seattle Opera, Glyndebourne, Deutsche Oper am Rhein, and Frankfurt Opera. An avid recitalist, he cofounded and now directs the Collaborative Arts Institute of Chicago to promote art song and vocal chamber music. He made his San Francisco Symphony debut in June 2009.

Mr. Phan began the 2023–24 season with CAIC’s Collaborative Works Festival and joined Palaver Strings for A Change is Gonna Come, featuring two song cycles composed for him: Nico Muhly’s Stranger and Errollyn Wallen’s Protest Songs. He gives the West Coast premiere of Joel Puckett’s There Was A Child Went Forth with the Berkeley Symphony and the world premiere of Vivian Fung’s Songs for the Next Generation at New York’s Kaufman Music Center, where he is artist in residence for the entire season.

Mr. Phan’s most recent album, Stranger: Works for Tenor by Nico Muhly, was nominated for the 2022 Grammy Award for Best Classical Solo Vocal Album, and two previous albums were also nominated for the same award. Raised in Ann Arbor, Michigan, Mr. Phan is a graduate of the University of Michigan, also studied at the Manhattan School of Music, and is an alumnus of the Houston Grand Opera Studio. He currently serves as a coach on the faculty of the San Francisco Opera Center, where he works with Adler Fellows.

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.