David Robertson—conductor, artist, composer, thinker, American musical visionary—occupies the most prominent podiums in orchestral music, new music, and opera. He is a champion of contemporary composers and an adventurous programmer. He has served in numerous artistic leadership positions, including chief conductor and artistic director of the Sydney Symphony; a transformative 13-year tenure as music director of the St. Louis Symphony; music director of the Orchestre National de Lyon; principal guest conductor of the BBC Symphony Orchestra; and, as a protégé of Pierre Boulez, music director of the Ensemble InterContemporain.

This season, Robertson celebrates the Boulez centennial with the New York Philharmonic, Juilliard Orchestra, Aspen Music Festival, and Lucerne Festival Contemporary Orchestra. He also conducts the Philadelphia Orchestra, Cleveland Orchestra, Seattle Symphony, Chicago Symphony, Seoul Philharmonic, Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, NDR Elbphilharmonie, and Bavarian Radio Orcehstra. He leads European tours with the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin and Australian Youth Orchestra, and continues his three-year project as the inaugural creative partner of the Utah Symphony and Opera, where his guitar ensemble, Another Night on Earth, made its US debut. In previous seasons, he has appeared with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, Vienna Philharmonic, Czech Philharmonic, São Paulo State Symphony Orchestra, and many other major ensembles and festivals on five continents. He made his San Francisco Symphony debut in January 1997.

Since his Metropolitan Opera debut in 1996, Robertson has conducted the 2019–20 season opening premiere production of Porgy and Bess, for which he shared a Grammy Award for Best Opera Recording. In 2022, he conducted the Met revival of the production, in addition to making his Rome Opera debut conducting Janáček’s Káťa Kabanová. Robertson is the director of conducting studies at the Juilliard School and serves on the Tianjin Juilliard Advisory Council. He is a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres of France, and is the recipient of numerous artistic awards.

Icelandic pianist Víkingur Ólafsson has captured the public and critical imagination with profound musicianship and visionary programs. One of the most sought-after artists of today, Ólafsson’s recordings for Deutsche Grammophon have led to almost one billion streams and garnered numerous awards, including BBC Music Magazine Album of the Year and Opus Klassik Solo Recording of the Year, twice. Other notable honors include Rolf Schock Music Prize, Gramophone’s Artist of the Year, Order of the Falcon (Iceland’s order of chivalry), as well as the Icelandic Export Award, given by the president of Iceland.

In a landmark move, Ólafsson devoted his entire 2023–24 season to a world tour of a single work: J.S. Bach’s Goldberg Variations, performing it 88 times to great critical acclaim. The 2024–25 season will see Ólafsson as artist in residence with the Tonhalle Zurich and Royal Stockholm Philharmonic, as well as “artist in focus” at Vienna Musikverein. He will tour in Europe with the Cleveland Orchestra, London Philharmonic, and Zurich Tonhalle Orchestra; perform with the Berlin Philharmonic at the BBC Proms; and return to the New York Philharmonic. In January 2025, will give the world premiere of John Adams’s After the Fall with San Francisco Symphony, a piano concerto written especially for him. He made his San Francisco Symphony debut in June 2022 performing Adams’s Must the Devil Have All the Good Tunes?. In spring 2025, Ólafsson will perform his new piano recital, the last three sonatas of Beethoven, on multiple dates across the United States and Europe.

Susanna Phillips sings this season with the Seattle Symphony, Musica Sacra, Oratorio Society of New York, and St. Louis Symphony. Her career highlights include numerous appearances at the Metropolitan Opera, where she recently made a role debut at Mimì in La bohème; leading roles with Boston Baroque; and appearances at Lyric Opera of Chicago, Cincinnati Opera, Dallas Opera, Minnesota Opera, Fort Worth Opera Festival, Boston Lyric Opera, Gran Teatro del Liceu, and Oper Frankfurt. In concert, she has collaborated with the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic, Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Philadelphia Orchestra, Santa Fe Symphony, Dallas Symphony, Gulbenkian Orchestra, Orchestra of St. Luke’s, Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, and her native Huntsville Symphony. An avid chamber music collaborator, she has sung alongside Eric Owens in a program co-curated by the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg for Washington Performing Arts.

Phillips is a winner of the Met’s Beverly Sills Artist Award; first prize and audience prize at Operalia; and top prizes from the American Opera Society Competition, the Musicians Club of Women in Chicago, and the Marilyn Horne Foundation Competition. She made her San Francisco Symphony debut in December 2012.

This season, tenor Arnold Livingston Geis returns to the role of Josef Bader in Aaron Zigman’s Emigré with the Beijing Music Festival, Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin, and Hong Kong Philharmonic. He also joins Opera Carolina as Rodolfo in La bohème, Cincinnati Opera as Motel in Fiddler on the Roof, Opera in the Heights for his role debut as Edgardo in Lucia di Lammermoor, and the Baltimore Symphony for Stravinsky’s Renard. Recent appearances include the New York Philharmonic, Los Angeles Philharmonic, and LA Master Chorale. He makes his San Francisco Symphony debut with these performances.

Geis made his Lincoln Center debut creating the role of Mr. Marks in Ricky Ian Gordon’s Intimate Apparel and joined esperanza spalding as Agamemnon in her and Wayne Shorter’s opera Iphigenia. He recently joined Washington National Opera as Jonathan Dale in Silent Night, Gastone in La traviata, and Busdriver/New Preacher in the world premiere of Taking Up Serpents. He also sang Nikolaus Sprink in Silent Night with Glimmerglass Opera, Arnold Murray in The Life and Death(s) of Alan Turing with Chicago Opera Theater, and Tamino in The Magic Flute with Pacific Opera Project. He has sung on film and television soundtracks including Tom and Jerry, Family Guy, Star Wars: The Last Jedi, Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, Fifty Shades of Grey, Minions, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, and Disney’s live-action The Lion King.

Established in 1978, the mission of the San Francisco Girls Chorus is to create outstanding performances featuring the unique and compelling sound of young women’s voices through an exemplary program committed to education and visionary leadership in the development of this art form. Under the direction of Artistic Director Valérie Sainte-Agathe, the San Francisco Girls Chorus has achieved an incomparable sound that underscores the unique clarity and force of impeccably trained treble voices fused with expressiveness and drama.

SFGC offers a sequential six-ensemble choral training program for girls, young women, and non-binary and gender-expansive youth, ages 4–18, from throughout the Bay Area. Ensembles include the semi-professional Concert Group and the professional-level performance, recording, and touring Premier Ensemble. A leading voice in the Bay Area and national music scenes, the chorus has produced award-winning concerts, recordings, and tours; empowered young women in music and other fields; enhanced and expanded the field of music for treble voices; and set the international standard for the highest level of performance and education. 

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.