The Grammy Award-winning Minnesota Orchestra, founded in 1903 and led since its centennial by Music Director Osmo Vänskä, is recognized for distinguished performances around the world, award-winning recordings, radio broadcasts, educational engagement programs, and commitment to building the orchestral repertoire of the future. The Orchestra tours regularly throughout Minnesota and nationally, and has toured abroad in Australia, Canada, East Asia, Europe, Latin America, the Middle East and South Africa. Recording has been an important part of the organization’s mission since the 1920s. During Vänskä’s tenure, the Orchestra has undertaken acclaimed recordings, including complete cycles of symphonies by Ludwig van Beethoven, Jean Sibelius and—now underway—Mahler.

Conductor Yue Bao serves as the Ting Tsung and Wei Fong Chao Foundation Assistant Conductor of the Houston Symphony, assisting Music Director Andrés Orozco-Estrada. In May 2019, she completed a two-year tenure as the Rita E. Hauser Conducting Fellow at the Curtis Institute of Music, working closely with Yannick Nézet-Séguin. She has been active as both a conductor and assistant, working with conductors, Michael Tilson Thomas, Osmo Vänskä, Esa-Pekka Salonen, Marin Alsop, David Robertson, Itzhak Perlman.

Possessing a voice praised by the San Francisco Chronicle for its “effortless precision and tonal luster,” Grammy Award-winning soprano Jessica Rivera is one of the most creatively inspired vocal artists before the public today. The intelligence, dimension and spirituality with which she infuses her performances on great international concert and opera stages has garnered Rivera unique artistic collaborations with many of today’s most celebrated composers, including John Adams, Osvaldo Golijov, Gabriela Lena Frank, Jonathan Leshnoff, Nico Muhly and Paola Prestini, and has brought her together with such esteemed conductors as Sir Simon Rattle, Esa-Pekka Salonen, Robert Spano, Markus Stenz, Bernard Haitink and Michael Tilson Thomas. An advocate of new music, Rivera has lent her voice to a plethora of world premieres, including Adams’ opera A Flowering Tree, Frank’s Conquest Requiem, Golijov's opera Ainadamar, Muhly’s song cycle The Adulteress and Spano’s Hölderlin Lieder, a song cycle written specifically for her.

BRKFST Dance Company is a group of collaborative breaking choreographers based in St. Paul, Minnesota, and founded in 2014. BRKFST performs regionally, premiering work at Walker Arts Center, the Southern Theater and the Cowles Center. In 2022 they toured to Dublin, Ireland, for Dance2Connect (D2C) Hip Hop Festival, performing “60/40.” Their film Dreamers (2019) was deemed official selection in 11 international film festivals receiving “Grand Jury Award” (In/Motion Festival 2021) and “Best Experimental Film” (Tirana International Film Festival 2020). BRKFST has set repertoire and original work on dancers at the University of MN—Twin Cities, Carleton College, D2C Festival (Ireland) and Bates Dance Festival (Maine).