Conrad Tao’s 2024–25 season includes a return to Carnegie Hall performing Debussy’s 12 Études alongside Keyed In, a work arranged and improvised by Tao on the Lumatone keyboard. He also returns to the Dallas Symphony, St. Louis Symphony, and Baltimore Symphony. Further appearances include the Indianapolis Symphony’s opening gala, as well as performances with the Seoul Philharmonic and NDR Radiophilharmonie. He also continues his collaboration with dancer Caleb Teicher in a nationwide US tour.

Last season, Tao made his subscription debut with the Chicago Symphony and returned to the New York Philharmonic. He also celebrated Rachmaninoff’s 150th anniversary with recitals presented by the Cleveland Orchestra and Klavierfestival Ruhr. The season also saw concerts with the Philadelphia Orchestra, Boston Symphony, as well as performances celebrating the 100th anniversary of Rhapsody in Blue at the Berlin Philharmonie, Hamburg Elbphilharmonie, and Amsterdam Concertgebouw with the Kansas City Symphony. His companion piece to Gershwin’s Rhapsody, Flung Out, was commissioned by the Santa Rosa Symphony, Aspen Music Festival, and Omaha Symphony.

Tao was the recipient of a New York Dance and Performance Bessie Award for Outstanding Sound Design / Music Composition. He is also the recipient of an Avery Fisher Career Grant and was named a Gilmore Young Artist. He made his San Francisco Symphony debut in February 2008 and became a Shenson Young Artist in 2023.

Alicia Hall Moran is a multi-dimensional artist performing and composing between the genres of opera, art, theater, and jazz. She made her Broadway debut in the Tony-winning revival The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess, starring as Bess on a 20-city American tour. Her artist residencies include the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, MASSMoCA, and National Sawdust. She has been commissioned by ArtPublic/Miami Art Basel, Museum of Modern Art, The Kitchen, Histories Remixed/Art Institute Chicago, and Prototype Festival/Beth Morrison Projects, and released critically-acclaimed works such as HEAVY BLUE, the motown project, The Five Fans, Breaking Ice: The Battle of the Carmens, and Black Wall Street.

In partnership with husband and collaborator Jason Moran, she was awarded a 2017 Art of Change fellowship by the Ford Foundation, and has generated work for the Venice Biennale, Whitney Biennial, Walker Art Center, and Philadelphia Museum of Art, and most recently, Carnegie Hall, Symphony Center in Chicago, and Elb Philharmonie in Hamburg, among many others. Ms. Moran’s vocal performances travel fluidly from jazz clubs to orchestras. She makes her San Francisco Symphony debut with these performances.

(January 2023)

Kristen Toedtman has performed as soloist with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, New World Symphony, Britt Festival Orchestra, Corona del Mar Festival Orchestra, Baltimore Concert Artists, and Musica Angelica orchestras, at Walt Disney Concert Hall, Carnegie Hall, the Hollywood Bowl, and other venues around the country. She makes her San Francisco Symphony debut with these performances.

With her partner, Chris Pumphrey, she sings songs of healing and praise for the wonders of creation to create space for listeners to meditate, heal, and explore their inner worlds. She has led singers in homeless shelters, health clinics, and on Skid Row. As director of the Community Chorus of Peabody, she brought the choir through the pandemic, emerging to join the Baltimore Symphony in a new realization of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony as a part of the Global Ode to Joy project. She has two self-released records available on all online platforms as well as on her website.


(January 2023)

 
Gabriel Kahane is a musician and storyteller whose work cuts to the heart. As a singer-songwriter, his most recent release is Magnificent Bird (Nonesuch Records), a meditation on grief and gratitude, written during the chaotic month leading up to the 2020 election.

Highlights of the 20202–23 season include premiere performances of a folk opera, The Right to Be Forgotten, with the Oregon and Cincinnati symphonies, a recital at London’s Southbank Centre, and appearances with the Danish String Quartet. He makes his San Francisco Symphony debut with these performances.

Mr. Kahane’s album and stage spectacle, The Ambassador, was produced at the BAM Next Wave Festival in 2014 under the direction of Tony-winner John Tiffany. That work was followed by Book of Travelers—a chronicle of the composer’s 2016 post-election railway journey—which was staged at BAM in 2017 and released as an album by Nonesuch in 2018.

His creative collaborators range from Phoebe Bridgers, Paul Simon, Sylvan Esso, Chris Thile, and Sufjan Stevens, to Caroline Shaw, Anthony McGill, Pekka Kuusisto, and the Attacca Quartet. His prose has appeared in The New Yorker online and in The New York Times; a wide-ranging newsletter “Words and Music,” can be accessed at gabrielkahane.substack.com.

The recipient of a 2021 Charles Ives Fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Mr. Kahane recently relocated to Portland, Oregon, where he lives with his family and has just begun his second term as Creative Chair of the Oregon Symphony.

(January 2023)

Holcombe Waller is a unique voice in music theater. He is a Creative Capital artist, a four-time recipient of the MAP Fund grant, and a Joan Shipley Fellow of the Oregon Arts Commission Arts. Mr. Waller is known for his evening-length, theater-based interdisciplinary music performances, which have been presented and commissioned by the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Under the Radar Festival at the New York Public Theater, On the Boards Seattle, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Centre Pompidou Paris, and many other presenters and festivals internationally.

In addition to his interdisciplinary work, he has self-released five albums on his own label, Napoleon Records. In 2018 he performed Requiem Mass: A Queer Divine Right at Grace Cathedral in San Francisco as a part of Yerba Buena Center for the Art’s Transform Festival. makes his San Francisco Symphony debut with these performances.

(January 2023)

Community Music Center (CMC) makes high-quality music accessible to people of all ages, backgrounds and abilities, regardless of financial means. CMC offers the largest tuition assistance program of its kind in the country, serving more than 3,000 students each year with music lessons, classes, and other programs. CMC believes in the power of music to connect people, celebrate cultures, and transform lives, with students and faculty who are engaged and fulfilled in making music together, and audiences who are energized by their experiences. Students can study jazz, blues, Latin, pop, folk, rock, and classical music from master teachers. CMC also presents free and low-cost concerts, workshops, and master classes for the public. The San Francisco Symphony celebrates the Community Music Center's century-long commitment to making music accessible to all. For more information, visit www.sfcmc.org.

(January 2023)

Founded in 2011, Skywatchers brings artists into durational collaboration with residents of San Francisco’s Tenderloin neighborhood. We believe that relationship is the first site of social change, that large-scale transformation begins with intimate, interpersonal interaction, engendering change for all involved—artists, participants, and audiences. Centering resident lives and experiences, the multi-disciplinary, mixed-ability ensemble creates art works that amplify neighborhood stories, interrogating the poverty industrial complex, illuminating narratives too often invisible in our collective cultural production, and positioning community voices in the civic discourse through the arts. The Skywatchers Ensemble of Tenderloin residents and artists co-create multi-disciplinary art works that range from formal and site-specific performance to intervention, ritual, visual art, and multi-media works as part of a long-term community-embedded social practice. In addition to our core ensemble, our programs include workshops in SROs, a youth partnership with Larkin Street Youth Services, and a health equity collaboration with Faithful Fools and UCSF, as well as partnerships with over a dozen Tenderloin non-profits and community groups. To learn more, visit abdproductions.org/about-skywatchers.

(January 2023)