Francesco Lecce-Chong was appointed music director of both the Eugene Symphony and Santa Rosa Symphony before he turned 30. With these groups, he has commissioned more than a dozen major orchestral works and built innovative community partnerships. Now in his seventh season leading the Santa Rosa Symphony at the Green Music Center, he has grown the orchestra’s reputation as an exciting and important regional orchestra. This season, he becomes artistic partner with the Eugene Symphony, a newly created position which furthers his artistic vision with the orchestra.

During the pandemic, Lecce-Chong and the Santa Rosa Symphony reached more than two million households in the Bay Area through their Santa Rosa Symphony Presents TV broadcasts on PBS, which led to the first CD release in the orchestra’s history. With both Santa Rosa and Eugene, he led the “First Symphony Project,” which consisted of major commissions from the next generation of composers across four seasons, complete with multiple residencies in local communities.

Lecce-Chong has appeared with the New York Philharmonic, Seattle Symphony, Baltimore Symphony, Utah Symphony, North Carolina Symphony, Louisville Orchestra, Kansas City Symphony, Detroit Symphony, Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, and Romanian National Radio Orchestra. He made his San Francisco Symphony debut in June 2019.
 

Recognized as the world’s premier pipa virtuoso, Wu Man is a soloist, educator, and composer who gives her lute-like instrument—which has a history of more than 2,000 years in China—a new role in both traditional and contemporary music. She has premiered hundreds of new works for pipa, while spearheading multimedia projects to both preserve and create global awareness of China’s ancient musical traditions. She frequently collaborates with the Kronos Quartet, Shanghai Quartet, and the Knights, and is a founding member of the Silkroad Ensemble. She has appeared on nearly 50 recordings, including numerous Grammy Award–winning and nominated albums. This season, Wu toured China with the Philadelphia Orchestra and joins the Juilliard Quartet at Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. 

Born in Hangzhou, Wu studied at the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing, where she became the first recipient of a master’s degree in pipa. In 2023 she was honored with a National Heritage Fellowship from the National Endowment of the Arts and the Asia Society’s Asia Arts Game Changers Award. She is a visiting professor at the Central Conservatory in Beijing and a distinguished professor at the Zhejiang and the Xi’an conservatories. In 2021 she received an honorary doctorate from the New England Conservatory of Music. She made her San Francisco Symphony debut in April 1993.