Kazuki Yamada is music director of the City of Birmingham Symphony and also artistic and music director of the Monte-Carlo Philharmonic. Last summer he returned to the BBC Proms with the CBSO, and this season appears with the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin at Musikfest Berlin and will take the CBSO on tour to Europe and Japan. With Monte-Carlo Opera, he leads a double bill of Ravel’s L’enfant et les sortilèges and L’heure espagnole, and debuts with the Berlin Philharmonic, Filarmonica della Scala, Swedish Radio Symphony, Cleveland Orchestra, New York Philharmonic, and the San Francisco Symphony with these performances.

Born in Kanagawa, Japan, Yamada worked closely with Seiji Ozawa, which served to underline the importance of what he calls his “Japanese feeling” for classical music. He continues to work and perform in Japan every season with the NHK Symphony and Yomiuri Nippon Symphony. He studied music at Tokyo University of the Arts and won first prize in the 51st International Besançon Competition for Young Conductors in 2009. He now resides in Berlin.

Liv Redpath appears this season with Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia as Agnès in Written on Skin, Santa Fe Opera as Susanna in Le nozze di Figaro, Bavarian State Opera as Sophie in Der Rosenkavalier, and La Monnaie as the Woodbird in Siegfried. Orchestral engagements include the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France for Debussy’s La Damoiselle élue and the Lucerne Festival for Boulez’s Le Soleil des Eaux. She makes her San Francisco Symphony debut with these performances.

Last season, she made multiple debuts including the Royal Opera House in the title role of Lucia di Lammermoor, the Metropolitan Opera as Oscar in Un Ballo in Maschera, Berlin Philharmonic in Schoenberg’s Die Jakobsleiter, Hamburg State Opera for Lucia, the English Concert as Drusilla in L’incoronazione di Poppea, and the Atlanta Opera as Tytania in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. She also returned to the Metropolitan Opera to sing Pamina in The Magic Flute and Santa Fe Opera for performances as Zerlina in Don Giovanni and Sophie in Der Rosenkavalier.

Redpath was a finalist at the 2019 Operalia competition and received second prize, the special French opera prize, and audience favorite at the 56th Tenor Viñas International Contest. A graduate of Harvard University and the Juilliard School, she was a Domingo-Colburn-Stein Young Artist with the Los Angeles Opera.

Michael Sumuel appears this season with the Metropolitan Opera in the title role of Le nozze di Figaro, Washington National Opera as Porgy in Porgy and Bess, and the Candian Opera Company and LA Opera as Sharpless in Madama Butterfly. He makes debuts with the Chicago Symphony, Camerata Salzburg, and Houston Symphony.

Operatic highlights include the Metropolitan Opera as Reginald in X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X and Belcore in L’Elisir d’Amore;San Francisco Opera for the title role in Le nozze di Figaro, Escamillo in Carmen, and Elviro in Xerxes; Lyric Opera of Chicago as Masetto in Don Giovanni; Glyndebourne Festival Opera as Sharpless, Junius in The Rape of Lucretia, and Theseus in A Midsummer Night’s Dream; Seattle Opera as the title role in Figaro and Leporello in Don Giovanni; and Santa Fe Opera in Carmen. In concert, he has appeared with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Cleveland Orchestra, New York Philharmonic, Seattle Symphony, and Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra.

Sumuel was awarded a Richard Tucker Career Grant, was a Metropolitan Opera National Council Audition grand finalist, and won the Dallas Opera Guild Vocal Competition. He is an alumnus of the Houston Grand Opera Studio, Merola Opera Program, and the Filene Young Artist program at Wolf Trap Opera. He currently resides in San Francisco with his wife and son and made his San Francisco Symphony debut in December 2012.

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.