Yehudi Menuhin, Baron Menuhin, was an American-born British violinist and conductor who spent most of his performing career in Britain. He is widely considered one of the great violinists of the 20th century. He played the Soil Stradivarius, considered one of the finest violins made by Italian luthier Antonio Stradivari.
The San Francisco Symphony (SFS), founded in 1911, is an American orchestra based in San Francisco, California. Since 1980 the orchestra has been resident at the Louise M. Davies Symphony Hall in the city's Hayes Valley neighborhood. The San Francisco Symphony Youth Orchestra and the San Francisco Symphony Chorus (1972) are part of the organization. Michael Tilson Thomas became the orchestra's music director in 1995, and concluded his tenure in 2020 when Esa-Pekka Salonen took over the position.
The Los Angeles Philharmonic, officially known in shorthand as LA Phil, is an American orchestra based in Los Angeles, California. It has a regular season of concerts from October through June at the Walt Disney Concert Hall, and a summer season at the Hollywood Bowl from July through September. Gustavo Dudamel is the current music director, Esa-Pekka Salonen is conductor laureate, Zubin Mehta is conductor emeritus, and Susanna Mälkki is principal guest conductor. John Adams is the orchestra's current composer-in-residence.
Michael Tilson Thomas is an American conductor, pianist and composer. He is Artistic Director Laureate of the New World Symphony, an American orchestral academy based in Miami Beach, Florida, Music Director Laureate of the San Francisco Symphony, and Conductor Laureate of the London Symphony Orchestra.
The San Francisco Opera (SFO) is an American opera company founded in 1923 by Gaetano Merola (1881–1953) based in San Francisco, California.
Morten Johannes Lauridsen is an American composer. A National Medal of Arts recipient (2007), he was composer-in-residence of the Los Angeles Master Chorale from 1994 to 2001, and is the distinguished professor emeritus of composition at the University of Southern California Thornton School of Music, where he taught for fifty-two years until his retirement in 2019.
David Conte is an American composer who has written over 150 works published by E.C. Schirmer, including six operas, a musical, works for chorus, solo voice, orchestra, chamber music, organ, piano, guitar, and harp. Conte has received commissions from Chanticleer, the San Francisco Symphony Chorus, Harvard University Chorus, the Men’s Glee Clubs of Cornell University and the University of Notre Dame, GALA Choruses from the cities of San Francisco, New York, Boston, Atlanta, Seattle, and Washington, D.C., the Dayton Philharmonic, the Oakland Symphony, the Stockton Symphony, the Atlantic Classical Orchestra, the American Guild of Organists, Sonoma City Opera, and the Gerbode Foundation. He was honored with the American Choral Directors Association (ACDA) Brock Commission in 2007 for his work The Nine Muses, and in 2016 he won the National Association of Teachers of Singing (NATS) Art Song Composition Award for his work American Death Ballads.
The Handel and Haydn Society is an American chorus and period instrument orchestra based in Boston, Massachusetts. Known colloquially as 'H+H', the organization has been in continual performance since its founding in 1815, the longest-serving such performing arts organization in the United States.
The California Symphony is a professional orchestra based in Walnut Creek, California, in the East Bay region of the San Francisco Bay Area. The orchestra, which "may be the most forward-looking music organization around", performs in the Lesher Center for the Arts in Walnut Creek and is a member of the Association of California Symphony Orchestras. It has been credited with "redefining the classical concert experience as we know it."
Donato Cabrera is an American conductor with an active international career. He is the Music Director of the California Symphony and the Las Vegas Philharmonic, and was the Resident Conductor of the San Francisco Symphony and Wattis Foundation Music Director of the San Francisco Symphony Youth Orchestra from 2009-2016.
The San Francisco Gay Men's Chorus (SFGMC) is the world's first openly gay chorus, one of the world's largest male choruses and the group most often credited with creating the LGBT choral movement.
The Community Women's Orchestra (CWO), based in Oakland, California, was founded by conductor Nan Washburn in 1985 as a community project adjunct to The Women's Philharmonic (TWP), a now-defunct, professional orchestra.
The Peninsula Symphony is an American symphony orchestra, based in the San Francisco Peninsula, California. The orchestra consists of over 90 community musicians. In 1995, the Peninsula Symphony was featured in a PBS broadcast.
David Alan Miller is a multi-Grammy Award-winning American symphony orchestra conductor, and since 1992, music director of the Albany Symphony Orchestra. Miller served as assistant and associate conductor of the Los Angeles Philharmonic from 1987–92 and music director of the New York Youth Symphony from 1982-88. He is currently also Artistic Advisor to The Little Orchestra Society in New York City.
The San Francisco Symphony Youth Orchestra (SFSYO) is the youth orchestra of the San Francisco Symphony. The SFSYO performs an annual concert series and has made several recordings. The orchestra rehearses in Louise M. Davies Symphony Hall, directed by Daniel Stewart.
Emanuel Leplin was a composer, conductor, and painter active mainly in the second half of the 20th century. He was born in San Francisco, and joined the San Francisco Symphony as a violist in 1941, conducting it in two of his own works, in 1941 and 1947. In 1954, he contracted polio, and afterward, was unable to hold a brush or compose using anything below his neck but the first three fingers of his right hand. With these fingers he composed three symphonies, a violin concerto, and many other works for orchestra and chamber groups.
Mary Chun is an American conductor based in the San Francisco Bay Area. She is Music Director of the Cinnabar Theater and has been the conductor of Earplay since 2000.
Shinji Takane Eshima is a Japanese-American musician, composer, and teacher.
Robert Paul Commanday was an American music critic who specialized in classical music. Among the leading critics of the West Coast, Commanday was a major presence in the Bay Area music scene over a five-decade career. From 1964 to 1994 he was the chief classical music critic of the San Francisco Chronicle, following which he became the founding editor of San Francisco Classical Voice in 1998.
Robert Grove Hughes (1933–2022) was an American composer, conductor, bassoonist and music scholar based in the San Francisco Bay Area. He was known for his wide-ranging artistic interests—extending to poetry, performance art and social commentary—and advocacy of contemporary, often experimental music. San Francisco Chronicle critic Joshua Kosman described Hughes as a visionary and "musical Zelig" who "played a key role in a vast range of ambitious and influential musical projects." In the 1960s, Hughes co-founded the long-running Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music and co-founded and led the award-winning Oakland Symphony Youth Orchestra. In subsequent decades he co-founded and led the Arch Ensemble for Experimental Music with baritone vocalist Thomas Buckner and co-directed the performance group MA FISH CO with his wife, artist Margaret Fisher.
