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The San Francisco Symphony is one of the few major U.S. orchestras with its own chorus and the SFS Chorus is recognized internationally as one of America’s finest. Established in 1972 at the request of Seiji Ozawa, the Symphony’s Music Director, the 155-member Chorus today gives a minimum of twenty-six performances each season and has sung under many of the world’s leading conductors, including Music Director Michael Tilson Thomas, SFS Conductor Laureate Herbert Blomstedt, Kurt Masur, Wolfgang Sawallisch, and Robert Shaw. Since March 2007 the San Francisco Symphony Chorus has been led by Chorus Director Ragnar Bohlin.
The SFS Chorus’s excellence has been recognized with four Grammy Awards, including Best Performance of a Choral Work (for Orff’s Carmina burana, the Symphony’s first Grammy, and for Brahms’s German Requiem) and for Classical Album of the Year (for a collection of Stravinsky’s music including Perséphone, The Firebird, and Le Sacre du printemps). The 2003 SFS Media recording of Mahler’s Symphony No. 3, featuring the women of the Chorus, won a Grammy Award for Best Classical Album. The SFS Chorus has also been heard on the soundtracks of the films Amadeus, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, and The Godfather III and on the video/DVD release of the Emmy-winning Sweeney Todd with the SFS.
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