Michael Tilson Thomas is the Music Director Laureate of the San Francisco Symphony, conductor laureate of the London Symphony Orchestra, and cofounder and artistic director laureate of the New World Symphony. He is a 12-time Grammy Award winner and has conducted the major orchestras of Europe and the United States.

Born in Los Angeles, he studied conducting and composition with Ingolf Dahl at the University of Southern California and as a young musician worked with artists including Igor Stravinsky and Aaron Copland. In his mid-20s, he became assistant conductor—and later principal guest conductor—of the Boston Symphony. He subsequently served as music director of the Buffalo Philharmonic, principal guest conductor of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and principal conductor of the London Symphony.

In 1987 he cofounded the New World Symphony, a postgraduate orchestral academy in Miami Beach dedicated to preparing young musicians of diverse backgrounds for leadership roles in classical music. He has worked with more than 1,200 NWS fellows, many of whom have gone on to major musical careers.

MTT became Music Director of the San Francisco Symphony in 1995, ushering in a period of significant growht and heightened international recognition for the orchestra. He led the Symphony in championing contemporary and American composers alongside classical masters, and as Music Director Laureate, he has returned to conduct the orchestra each season. 

His discography includes more than 120 recordings, and his television work includes series for the BBC and PBS, the New York Philharmonic’s Young People’s Concerts, and numerous televised performances. “Michael Tilson Thomas: Where Now Is” aired on PBS’s American Masters series in fall 2020.

Throughout his career, he has been an active composer, with major works including From the Diary of Anne Frank, premiered with narrator Audrey Hepburn, and Meditations on Rilke. Both appear on SFS Media’s Grammy Award-winning recording of his music. In 2023, Yuja Wang released a recording on Deutsche Grammophon which included his You Come Here Often?
He is an Officier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres of France, a member of the American Academies of Arts and Sciences and Arts and Letters, a National Medal of Arts recipient, and a 2019 Kennedy Center honoree.

Three major recording projects were released in 2024 in celebration of his 80th birthday: Grace: The Music of Michael Tilson Thomas on Pentatone; The Complete Columbia, CBS, and RCA Recordings on Sony Classical; and Complete Deutsche Grammophon & Argo Recordings on DG Eloquence. 

Angel Blue is a two-time Grammy Award winner, 2020 Beverly Sills Award recipient, and 2022 Richard Tucker Award winner. This season she sang Leonora in Il trovatore at San Francisco Opera and returns to Vienna State Opera in the title role of Tosca. She continues her season with performances as Micaëla in Carmen and a role debut as Magda in La Rondine at the Metropolitan Opera. Previous appearances include Aix-en Provence Festival, Semperoper Dresden, Los Angeles Opera, Seattle Opera, Theater an der Wien, La Scala, Baden-Baden Festspielhaus, Paris Opera, English National Opera, and San Diego Opera. She makes her San Francisco Symphony debut with these performances.

Ms. Blue made her US operatic debut as Musetta in La bohème at the Los Angeles Opera in 2007. As Mimì in La bohème, she has earned exceptional international acclaim, first singing the role at the English National Opera and since performing it for house debuts at Vienna State Opera, Canadian Opera Company, Hamburg State Opera, and the Met. Orchestral engagements have included the Berlin Philharmonic, Philadelphia Orchestra, Munich Philharmonic, Sydney Symphony, and London Philharmonic. Ms. Blue was raised in California and completed her musical studies at the University of California, Los Angeles.

This season Tamara Mumford makes her first appearances as Erda in Das Rheingold with both the Los Angeles Philharmonic and Dallas Symphony, and sings with the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center and the Festival Internacional Cervantino in Mexico. A graduate of the Metropolitan Opera’s Lindemann Young Artist Development Program, she has appeared in more than 200 performances with the company including Rigoletto, Nixon in China, and Die Zauberflöte. Other recent opera engagements have included the premiere of The Thirteenth Child at Santa Fe Opera; Tancredi with Teatro Nuovo; Aureliano in Palmira and Lucrezia Borgia at the Caramoor Festival; Phaedra, The Rape of Lucretia, and Yardbird at Opera Philadelphia; and L’incoronazione di Poppea at Glyndebourne and the BBC Proms.

In concert, Ms. Mumford has appeared with the New York Philharmonic, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Cleveland Orchestra, Chicago Symphony, Berlin Philharmonic, Netherland Radio Philharmonic, and at the Hollywood Bowl, Ravinia, and Tanglewood. Her recordings include Handel’s Messiah with the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, Mahler’s Symphony No. 8 and John Adams’s The Gospel According to the Other Mary with the Los Angeles Philharmonic on Deutsche Grammophon, and Beethoven’s Cantata on the Death of Emperor Joseph II with Michael Tilson Thomas and the San Francisco Symphony, which marked her SF Symphony debut in May 2013.

Ben Bliss was a 2021 recipient of the Beverly Sills Award and was also awarded the 2016 Martin E. Segal Award at Lincoln Center, the Mozart and Plácido Domingo awards at the 2015 Francisco Viñas International Competition, first prize at the 2014 Gerda Lissner and Licia Albanese-Puccini Foundation competitions, and the 2013 Operalia Don Plácido Domingo Sr. Zarzuela Prize.

Mr. Bliss’s 2023–24 season includes a house debut as Don Ottavio in Don Giovanni with Opéra National de Paris, performances as Tamino in Die Zauberflöte with Bavarian State Opera, and a return to Canadian Opera Company in Don Giovanni. Recent highlights include Tamino and Don Ottavio at the Metropolitan Opera, Chevalier de la Force in Dialogues des Carmélites at San Francisco Opera, and Tom Rakewell in The Rake’s Progress at Teatro Colón. He has also appeared with Los Angeles Opera, Opera Philadelphia, Seattle Opera, Boston Lyric Opera, Santa Fe Opera, and Frankfurt Opera. Concert highlights include debuts with the Los Angeles Philharmonic New York Philharmonic, and a recital tour including Carnegie Hall. He made his San Francisco Symphony debut with Handel’s Messiah in 2019.

Dashon Burton appears regularly throughout the United States and Europe. Highlights of his 2023–24 season include appearances with the New World Symphony and San Diego Symphony, Bach’s Christmas Oratorio with the Washington Bach Consort, Handel’s Messiah with the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra and Philadelphia Orchestra, and the title role in Sweeney Todd at Vanderbilt University. With the Cleveland Orchestra, he participates in a semi-staged version of Mozart’s The Magic Flute, and he joins the Milwaukee Symphony for three subscription weeks as an artist in residence.

Mr. Burton won his second Grammy Award in 2021 for Ethyl Smyth’s The Prison with the Experiential Orchestra. As an original member of the vocal ensemble Roomful of Teeth, he won his first Grammy for their inaugural recording. Other recordings include Songs of Struggle & Redemption: We Shall Overcome, the Grammy-nominated recording of Paul Moravec’s Sanctuary Road, Holocaust, 1944 by Lori Laitman, and Caroline Shaw’s The Listeners with Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra. He makes his San Francisco Symphony debut with these performances.

Mr. Burton received a bachelor of music degree from Oberlin College and Conservatory, and a master of music degree from Yale University’s Institute of Sacred Music. He is an assistant professor of voice at Vanderbilt University’s Blair School of Music.

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.

A native of Hong Kong, Jenny Wong is the newly appointed Chorus Director of the San Francisco Symphony, as well as the Associate Artistic Director of the Los Angeles Master Chorale. Recent conducting engagements include the Los Angeles Philharmonic Green Umbrella Series, the San Francisco Symphony Chorus, The Industry, Long Beach Opera, Pasadena Symphony and Pops, Phoenix Chorale, and the Gay Men’s Chorus of Los Angeles. This season, Wong will make her debut with the Los Angeles Opera Orchestra. Under Wong’s baton, the Los Angeles Master Chorale’s performance of Frank Martin’s Mass for Double Choir was named by Alex Ross as one of ten “Notable Performances and Recordings of 2022” in the New Yorker. In 2021, Wong was one of nine national recipients of OPERA America’s inaugural Opera Grants for Women Stage Directors and Conductors. She has conducted Peter Sellars’ staging of Orlando di Lasso’s Lagrime di San Pietro (Melbourne International Arts Festival, the Festival Internacionale Cervantino, Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico, and in the U.S.), the opera Sweet Land by Du Yun and Raven Chacon (2021 Award for Best New Opera by the Music Critics’ Association), and Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire and Kate Soper’s Voices from the Killing Jar with Long Beach Opera in collaboration with WildUp.
 
As chorus master, Wong has prepared choruses for the Los Angeles Philharmonic and Gustavo Dudamel, including Mahler’s Symphony No. 8, winner of the 2022 Grammy Award for Best Choral Performance; San Francisco Symphony and Esa-Pekka Salonen, Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Susanna Mälkki, Osmo Vänska, Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra and Jaime Martin, Maria Guinand, Eric Whitacre, and Music Academy of the West, and the U.S. premiere of Tan Dun’s Buddha Passion. Wong was Assistant Producer of the Master Chorale’s latest album, Eric Whitacre’s The Sacred Veil with Signum Classics. 
 
Wong received her Doctor of Musical Arts and Master of Music from the University of Southern California. She earned her undergraduate degree in voice performance from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She has been a conducting fellow for the Oregon Bach Festival, Baltimore Chamber Orchestra, Norfolk Chamber Music Festival, Distinguished Concerts International New York, and Hong Kong SingFest. She won two consecutive World Champion titles at the World Choir Games 2010 and the International Johannes Brahms Choral Competition 2011, conducting the Diocesan Girls' School Choir from Hong Kong.