Santtu-Matias Rouvali is principal conductor of the Philharmonia Orchestra in London and honorary conductor of the Tampere Philharmonic, close to his home in Finland. This season he returns to the Cleveland Orchestra and New York Philharmonic, and in Europe appears with Orchestra Filarmonica della Scala, Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France, and Tonhalle‑Orchester Zürich, among others. In 2025, he toured the United States and Korea with the Philharmonia and in 2027 will tour with them to Cologne, Dortmund, and Munich. He makes his San Francisco Symphony debut with these performances.

Rouvali previously served as chief conductor of the Gothenburg Symphony, with whom he completed a Sibelius cycle recording with Alpha Classics in 2025. He went on to record Sibelius’s Violin Concerto with Ava Bahari, and in 2027 will conduct a recording of Kullervo, continuing this acclaimed recording series. His Sibelius recordings have earned awards including Gramophone Editor’s Choice, Choc de Classica, a prize from the German Record Critics, the Diapason d’Or “Découverte,” and Radio Classique’s Trophée.

Philharmonia Records’ first release—a double-CD titled Santtu conducts Strauss—was issued in March 2023, followed by recordings of Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake and Prokofiev’s Symphony No. 5. Mahler’s Symphony No. 2, the second release on the label, appeared in September 2023, followed by Santtu conducts Stravinsky in March 2024, featuring The Firebird Suite and Petrushka. Another significant release—Beethoven’s Triple Concerto with Benjamin Grosvenor, Nicola Benedetti, and Sheku Kanneh-Mason—was released on Decca in May 2024.

Renée Fleming is internationally celebrated for her vocal and dramatic artistry, as well as her dedicated advocacy for the powerful impacts of the creative arts in health. A 2023 Kennedy Center honoree and winner of five Grammy Awards and the National Medal of Arts, she has sung for momentous occasions from the Nobel Peace Prize ceremony to the Super Bowl.

Her new album, The Fiddle and the Drum, was released last May. A collaboration with 19-time Grammy Award–winning banjo virtuoso Béla Fleck, the album celebrates Appalachian bluegrass and folk music, with contributions from featured artists Dolly Parton, Vince Gill, Jerry Douglas, Aoife O’Donovan, Sierra Hull, and Sarah Jarosz. This fall, she brings her acclaimed portrayal of Pat Nixon in John Adams’s Nixon in China to the Washington National Opera.

Fleming’s anthology Music and Mind: Harnessing the Arts for Health and Wellness was published in 2024. A prominent advocate for research at the intersection of arts, health, and neuroscience, she has presented her live program Music and Mind in more than 70 cities around the world. The Renée Fleming NeuroArts Investigator Awards, her initiative with the Aspen Institute and the NeuroArts Blueprint, funds interdisciplinary research projects by early-career scientists in collaboration with creative artists.

Co-artistic director of the Aspen Opera Center and VocalArts at the Aspen Music Festival, Fleming is also artist development advisor at Wolf Trap Opera. Her other awards include the Fulbright Lifetime Achievement Medal and honorary doctorates from 10 major universities. She made her San Francisco Symphony debut in March 2002, singing Strauss’s Four Last Songs and Michael Tilson Thomas’s Poems of Emily Dickinson.

Peter Grunberg was appointed head of music staff at San Francisco Opera in 1992 and was also musical assistant to Michael Tilson Thomas at the San Francisco Symphony, where he was an assistant producer on several Grammy Award–winning recordings. He has collaborated in recital with Frederica von Stade and Thomas Hampson, conducted at the Moscow Conservatory and Sydney Opera House, and performed at the Aix-en-Provence Festival and at Tanglewood.