Thomas Wilkins is principal conductor of the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra, artistic advisor for education and community engagement at the Boston Symphony, principal guest conductor of the Virginia Symphony, and the Henry A. Upper Chair of orchestral conducting at Indiana University. He served as music director of the Omaha Symphony until 2021, and other past positions have included resident conductor of the Detroit Symphony and Florida Orchestra and associate conductor of the Richmond Symphony in Virginia. He also has served on the music faculties of North Park University in Chicago, the University of Tennessee in Chattanooga, and Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond. He has guest conducted orchestras throughout the United States and made his San Francisco Symphony debut in December 2019.

Devoted to promoting a lifelong enthusiasm for music, Wilkins brings energy and commitment to audiences of all ages. He has received many awards, including the League of American Orchestras’ Gold Baton Award and the Omaha Entertainment and Arts Awards Lifetime Achievement Award for Music. Boston’s Longy School of Music awarded him the Leonard Bernstein Lifetime Achievement Award for the Elevation of Music in Society, and he was the beneficiary of an honorary doctorate of the arts from the Boston Conservatory.

Branford Marsalis is a saxophonist, bandleader, classical soloist, and film and Broadway composer. Over his decades-long career, he has received numerous awards and honors, including three Grammys, Emmy and Tony nominations, and a citation by the National Endowment for the Arts as a Jazz Master.

Mr. Marsalis is a sought-after soloist who performs with many of the world’s finest orchestras. His repertoire includes compositions by Claude Debussy, Alexander Glazunov, Jacques Ibert, Gustav Mahler, Darius Milhaud, Ned Rorem, Ralph Vaughan Williams, and John Williams. As a chamber musician, he has toured with the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia, and City Chamber Orchestra of Hong Kong. He made his San Francisco Symphony debut in March 1994.

Emerging from the global pandemic in January 2022, Mr. Marsalis first returned to the New York Philharmonic to perform John Adams’s Saxophone Concerto, which highlighted his incredible agility and the instrument’s lyrical voice. Mr. Marsalis then launched a tour with the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra in a program that explored the intersectionality of jazz and classical music. Later that year he performed John Williams’s Escapades in Tanglewood’s celebration of the composer’s 90th birthday.

Mr. Marsalis continues to perform with The Branford Marsalis Quartet, which he formed in 1986. His work on Broadway has garnered a Drama Desk Award and Tony nominations for the acclaimed revivals of Children of a Lesser God, Fences, and A Raisin in the Sun. As a composer for film and television, his credits include original music composed for The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, and the Emmy-nominated Tulsa Burning: The 1921 Race Massacre.

(May 2023)