James Gaffigan serves as music director of the Komische Oper Berlin, where he began his third season in 2025–26, and he was recently named music director of Houston Grand Opera beginning in 2027. Guest engagements this season include returns to the Los Angeles Philharmonic, National Symphony, Chicago Symphony, NDR Elbphilharmonie, Les Arts Valencia Opera, and Verbier Festival.

Gaffigan regularly works with the New York Philharmonic, Cleveland Orchestra, Philadelphia Orchestra, Detroit Symphony, and Metropolitan Opera, among many others. In Europe, he has appeared with the London Symphony, Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, Vienna Symphony, Munich Philharmonic, Bavarian Radio Orchestra, Norwegian Opera and Ballet, Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin, Staatskapelle Berlin, and Czech Philharmonic.

Gaffigan’s previous titles include music director of the Palau de les Arts Reina Sofía in Valencia, Spain; principal guest conductor of both the Netherlands Radio Philharmonic and the Trondheim Symphony Orchestra and Opera; chief conductor of the Lucerne Symphony; and assistant conductor of the Cleveland orchestra. He made his San Francisco Symphony debut in December 2006 and served as Associate Conductor from 2006 to 2009.

Yo-Yo Ma’s multifaceted career is testament to his belief in culture’s power to generate trust and understanding. Whether performing new or familiar works for cello, bringing communities together to explore culture’s role in society, or engaging unexpected musical forms, Ma strives to foster connections that stimulate the imagination and reinforce our humanity.

Most recently, Ma began Our Common Nature, a cultural journey to celebrate the ways that nature can reunite us in pursuit of a shared future. It follows the Bach Project, a 36-community, six-continent tour of J.S. Bach’s cello suites paired with local cultural programming. Both endeavors reflect Ma’s lifelong commitment to stretching the boundaries of genre and tradition to understand how music helps us to imagine and build a stronger society.
Ma is an advocate for a future guided by humanity, trust, and understanding. Among his many roles, he is a United Nations Messenger of Peace, the first artist ever appointed to the World Economic Forum’s board of trustees, a member of the board of Nia Tero, the US-based nonprofit working in solidarity with Indigenous peoples and movements worldwide, and the founder of the global music collective Silkroad.
Ma was born in 1955 to Chinese parents living in Paris. He began to study the cello with his father at age four and three years later moved with his family to New York City, where he continued his cello studies at the Juilliard School before pursuing a liberal arts education at Harvard.

Ma has recorded more than 120 albums and is the winner of 20 Grammy Awards. He has also received the Avery Fisher Prize, National Medal of the Arts, Presidential Medal of Freedom, Kennedy Center Honors, Polar Music Prize, and Birgit Nilsson Prize. He has performed for nine American presidents, most recently on the occasion of President Biden’s inauguration.

Ma and his wife have two children. He plays four cellos: two modern instruments made by Moes & Moes, a 1733 Montagnana from Venice, and the 1712 “Davidoff” Stradivarius. He made his San Francisco Symphony debut in March 1970.