Since his triumph as winner of the 1970 Chopin International Piano Competition, Garrick Ohlsson has established himself worldwide as a musician of magisterial interpretive and technical prowess. Although long regarded as one of the world’s leading exponents of the music of Frédéric Chopin, Ohlsson commands an enormous repertoire which ranges over the entire piano literature encompassing more than 80 concertos.

This season, Ohlsson appears with the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, Oregon Symphony, and Fort Worth Symphony. Collaborations with the Cleveland, Emerson, Tokyo, and Takács quartets have led to decades of touring and recordings, and his solo recordings are available on Hyperion and Bridge Records.

Ohlsson studied at the Juilliard School and was awarded the Avery Fisher Prize in 1994 and the University Musical Society (University of Michigan) Distinguished Artist Award in 1998. He was the 2014 recipient of the Jean Gimbel Lane Prize in Piano Performance from Northwestern University, and in August 2018, the Polish government awarded him the Gloria Artis Gold Medal for Cultural Merit. He is a Steinway Artist and lives in San Francisco, where he serves on the piano faculty of SFCM. He made his San Francisco Symphony debut in May 1972.

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.

Guest chorus director Elliot James-Ginn Encarnación is a composer and conductor of choral and operatic repertoire. As a self-taught tenor, he has appeared as a soloist with the San Francisco Symphony, California Bach Society, Dessoff Choirs, Long Island Symphony Choral Association, and Musica Sacra. His compositions and performances can be heard frequently in choral contexts with premier choral ensembles in New York, Santa Fe, and the Bay Area, and he has recorded for the Delos and Decca labels. He has served as artistic director for the Opera Theater Unlimited and Prodigal Opera Theatre, and as composer in residence for the International Orange Chorale in San Francisco.