Edwin Outwater regularly works with the world’s top orchestras, institutions, and artists to reinvent the concert experience. His ability to cross genres has led to collaborations with Metallica, Wynton Marsalis, Renée Fleming, and Yo-Yo Ma. He is music director of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music and music director laureate of the Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony.

Recent appearances include the New York Philharmonic, Cleveland Orchestra, Chicago Symphony, Philadelphia Orchestra, San Diego Symphony, Seattle Symphony, and New World Symphony, as well as the Royal Philharmonic in a multi-concert series opening the Steinmetz Hall in Florida. He also served as a producer and musical advisor for the National Symphony’ s 50th anniversary concert at the Kennedy Center. In December 2022, he premiered A Christmas Gaiety at the Royal Albert Hall with Peaches Christ and the BBC Concert Orchestra and returned in 2023. Outwater has held a long association with San Francisco Symphony. He was appointed Resident Conductor and Wattis Foundation Music Director of the SF Symphony Youth Orchestra by Michael Tilson Thomas in 2001 and they remained friends and colleagues for 25 years.

Teddy Abrams, a Grammy Award winner and Musical America’s 2022 conductor of the year, has been the galvanizing force behind the Louisville Orchestra’s artistic renewal since his appointment as music director in September 2014. His Kentucky achievements include the Louisville Orchestra Creators Corps, a residency initiative for composers; the In Harmony Tour, a community-building project funded by the Commonwealth of Kentucky; and collaborations with artists including Chris Thile, Jim James, Jack Harlow, Storm Large, and Jecorey “1200” Arthur, with whom Abrams founded the Louisville Orchestra Rap School.

Beyond Louisville, Abrams has conducted leading orchestras in Europe and North America, including the San Francisco Symphony, with whom he debuted as a conductor in 2012. In 2023, Abrams premiered his own composition Mammoth with the Louisville Orchestra and Yo-Yo Ma in Kentucky’s Mammoth Cave, and in 2024 his piano concerto for Yuja Wang won a Grammy Award. He began a new role as artistic and executive director of the Ojai Music Festival in September 2026.

Abrams first came to the attention of Michael Tilson Thomas when he wrote him a letter at age nine. MTT became a mentor, and they worked together regularly in the years following. Abrams was a conducting fellow at the New World Symphony and he has also been a champion of MTT’s compositions.

Yuja Wang is celebrated for her charismatic artistry, emotional honesty, and captivating stage presence. She has performed with the world’s most venerated conductors, musicians, and ensembles, and is renowned not only for her virtuosity, but her spontaneous and lively performances.

Wang was born into a musical family and began studying the piano at the age of six. She received advanced training in Canada and at the Curtis Institute of Music with Gary Graffman. Her international breakthrough came in 2007, when she replaced Martha Argerich as soloist with the Boston Symphony. Two years later, she signed an exclusive contract with Deutsche Grammophon and has since established her place among the world’s leading artists, with a succession of critically acclaimed performances and albums. Her recordings have garnered multiple awards, including five Grammy nominations and her first Grammy win for Best Classical Instrumental Solo with her 2023 release The American Project, which featured music by Teddy Abrams and Michael Tilson Thomas. For this she has also won an Opus Klassik award in the concerto category.

As a chamber musician, Wang has developed long-lasting partnerships with several leading artists. She made her San Francisco Symphony debut in February 2006 and became a Shenson Young Artist later that year. She returns to the Great Performers Series for a recital in April 2027.

Jean-Yves Thibaudet has earned a reputation as one of the world’s finest pianists and is especially known for his diverse interests beyond the classical world, including numerous collaborations in film, fashion, and visual arts. He is the first-ever artist in residence at the Colburn School, which awards several scholarships in his name. He made his San Francisco Symphony debut in October 1994.

A prolific recording artist, Thibaudet has appeared on more than 70 albums and six film scores. His extensive catalog has received two Grammy nominations, two Echo Awards, the German Record Critics’ Award, the Diapason d’Or, the Choc du Monde de la Musique, the Edison Prize, and Gramophone Awards. Thibaudet is the soloist on Dario Marianelli’s reissued score for Pride & Prejudice, which was certified Gold by the RIAA in 2025. His playing can also be heard on Atonement, The French Dispatch, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, and Wakefield. His concert wardrobe was designed by Vivienne Westwood.

John Wilson performs as a pianist with the San Francisco Symphony and San Diego Symphony, and serves as principal keyboard for the Marin Symphony. In 2026–27 he gives the Bay Area premiere of Caroline Shaw’s piano concerto Watermark and appears as soloist in Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 2 with the San Francisco Philharmonic. He has performed Philip Glass’s Piano Concerto No. 1 with the Chamber Orchestra of New York at Carnegie Hall and Beethoven’s Triple Concerto at the Sun Valley Music Festival, and has toured with the San Francisco Symphony under Michael Tilson Thomas and Esa-Pekka Salonen.

Wilson performed on the Grammy-winning San Francisco Symphony recordings of Meditations on Rilke and Adriana Mater. His Avie Records debut featured the world premiere of MTT’s Upon Further Reflection; he also appears on Pentatone’s Grace: The Music of Michael Tilson Thomas. He has premiered works by John Adams, Steve Reich, Timo Andres, and Gabriela Lena Frank. Wilson is a Steinway Artist.

Jeremy Denk is one of America’s foremost pianists. Also a New York Times bestselling author, he is the recipient of both the MacArthur Fellowship and the Avery Fisher Prize, and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Denk is also known for his original and insightful writing on music. His memoir, Every Good Boy Does Fine, was published to universal acclaim by Random House in 2022. He also wrote the libretto for a comic opera presented by Carnegie Hall, Cal Performances, and the Aspen Festival, and his writing has appeared in the New Yorker, the New Republic, the Guardian, Süddeutsche Zeitung, and on the front page of the New York Times Book Review.

Denk is recognized for his interpretations of the music of Charles Ives, and in celebration of the 150th anniversary of the composer’s birth, Nonesuch Records released a collection of his Ives recordings in 2024. His recording of Bach’s Goldberg Variations for Nonesuch Records reached No. 1 on the Billboard Classical Charts, and his recording of Beethoven’s Piano Sonata Opus 111 paired with Ligeti’s Études was named one of the best discs of the year by the New Yorker, NPR, and the Washington Post, and received special recognition by BBC Radio 3’s Building a Library. He made his San Francisco Symphony debut in 2006 and appeared many times with Michael Tilson Thomas and the Orchestra in San Francisco and on tour.

Audra McDonald is unparalleled in the breadth and versatility of her artistry as both a singer and an actor. The winner of a record-breaking six Tony Awards, two Grammy Awards and an Emmy, in 2015 she was named one of Time’s 100 most influential people and received the National Medal of Arts from President Barack Obama. In addition to her Tony-winning performances in Carousel, Master Class, Ragtime, A Raisin in the Sun, The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess, and Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar & Grill—the role that also served as the vehicle for her Olivier Award-nominated 2017 debut in London’s West End—she broke records yet again in 2024–25 when she headlined a new Broadway revival of Gypsy, garnering her an unprecedented 11th Tony nomination.

McDonald’s notable television credits include Private Practice, The Good Wife, The Good Fight, and The Gilded Age, and on film, she has appeared in Disney’s live-action Beauty and the Beast, the documentary Whitney Houston in Focus, Rustin, and the Aretha Franklin biopic Respect. She has issued five solo albums on the Nonesuch label as well as Sing Happy with the New York Philharmonic on Decca Gold. She is a founding member of Black Theatre United, board member of Covenant House International, and prominent advocate for LGBTQIA+ rights, and her favorite roles are those performed offstage, as an activist, wife to actor Will Swenson, and mother. She made her San Francisco Symphony debut in September 1998 in an all-Gershwin program led by Michael Tilson Thomas.

Two-time Grammy Award–winning mezzo-soprano Sasha Cooke has sung at the Metropolitan Opera, San Francisco Opera, English National Opera, Seattle Opera, Opéra National de Bordeaux, and Gran Teatre del Liceu, among others, and with more than 100 symphony orchestras worldwide. This season, she sings Elgar’s Sea Pictures with the Minnesota Orchestra, Ravel’s Shéhérazade with the Houston Symphony, Bach’s Christmas Oratorio with Orchestre National de France, a world premiere by Bernard Foccroulle and Chausson’s Poème de l’amour et de la mer with the London Symphony Orchestra, Verdi’s Requiem with the Baltimore Symphony, and Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony with the Chicago Symphony, among other appearances.

Cooke made her San Francisco Symphony debut in June 2009 and became a Shenson Young Artist in January 2010. She toured Europe with Michael Tilson Thomas and the Symphony, premiered MTT’s Meditations on Rilke (captured on a Grammy-winning SFS Media release), and recorded two of MTT’s songs on Grace: The Music of Michael Tilson Thomas. Last season, she sang Berlioz’s Les Nuits d’été with the Symphony and Music Director Designate Elim Chan.

Cooke is a graduate of Rice University and the Juilliard School. She also attended the Music Academy of the West, Aspen Music Festival, Ravinia Festival’s Stearns Music Institute, Wolf Trap Foundation, Marlboro Music Festival, and the Met’s Lindemann Young Artist Development Program.

Jenny Wong is 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, Los Angeles Opera Orchestra, the Industry, Long Beach Opera, Pasadena Symphony and Pops, Phoenix Chorale, and Gay Men’s Chorus of Los Angeles.

Under Wong’s baton, the Los Angeles Master Chorale’s performance of Frank Martin’s Mass was named for Alex Ross one of ten “Notable Performances and Recordings of 2022” in the New Yorker. In 2021 she was a national recipient of Opera America’s inaugural Opera Grants for Women Stage Directors and Conductors. She has conducted Peter Sellars’s staging of Orlando di Lasso’s Lagrime di San Pietro, Sweet Land by Du Yun and Raven Chacon, and Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire and Kate Soper’s Voices from the Killing Jar with the Long Beach Opera in collaboration with WildUp. She has prepared choruses for the Los Angeles Philharmonic, including for a recording of Mahler’s Symphony No. 8 that won a 2022 Grammy Award for Best Choral Performance.

A native of Hong Kong, Wong received her doctor of musical arts and master of music degrees from the University of Southern California and her undergraduate degree in voice performance from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. She won two consecutive world champion titles at the World Choir Games 2010 and the International Johannes Brahms Choral Competition 2011. She recently extended her contract with the SF Symphony through the 2028–29 season.