Christoph Eschenbach
is Music Director of both the National Symphony Orchestra and the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington DC. Prior to assuming those positions in 2010, he was music director of the Orchestre de Paris and the Philadelphia Orchestra. Eschenbach made his San Francisco Symphony debut as a pianist in 1972 and his conducting debut in 1975. He appeared here most recently for two weeks of concerts in 2010, in which he led works by Beethoven, Brahms, Schumann, Zemlinsky, and Dalbavie. A distinguished concert pianist before his conducting career, Eschenbach began winning major piano competitions at age eleven and made his United States debut in 1969 with the Cleveland Orchestra and George Szell, with whom he later studied conducting. Eschenbach’s current season includes performances with the NDR Symphony Orchestra, Munich Philharmonic, and Orchestre de Paris, as well as a tour of Germany with the London Philharmonic, concerts with the Israel Philharmonic, and a tour of Australia and Europe with the Australian Youth Orchestra. He returns to the Vienna State Opera to conduct performances of Richard Strauss’s Capriccio, leads the National Symphony at Kennedy Center and Carnegie Hall, and returns to the Boston Symphony, the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the New York Philharmonic.

Matthias Goerne
made his SFS debut in 1996 singing bass in Bruckner’s Mass No. 3 in F minor. Most recently, he performed Brahms’ A German Requiem with MTT and the Orchestra in 2008. Goerne has been a regular performer at venues including Carnegie Hall and London’s Wigmore Hall, and with musical partners including Eschenbach and pianists Pierre-Laurent Aimard, Leif Ove Andsnes and Alfred Brendel. He made his operatic debut in 1997 at the Salzburg Festival as Papageno in Mozart’s The Magic Flute. This season, Goerne sings Wolfram in Wagner’s Tannhäuser at the Bavarian State Opera and Amfortas in a concert version of Wagner’s Parsifal with the Teatro Real in Madrid. He will also appear with the Orchestre de Paris, Berlin Philharmonic, Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, and Filarmonica della Scala, as well as song recitals with Aimard and three Schubert cycles with Eschenbach at the Vienna Musikverein. He is currently recording an eleven-album series of Schubert songs for Harmonia Mundi.