Karina Canellakis

Karina Canellakis is an American conductor who trained first as a violinist, and it shows in how she works with string sections. She is chief conductor of the Netherlands Radio Philharmonic Orchestra and has led major orchestras across Europe and the United States. She comes to the San Francisco Symphony in October 2026 with a Russian and Soviet program: Prokofiev's Second Violin Concerto, Rachmaninoff's Symphonic Dances, and a contemporary work by Victoria Borisova-Ollas.

Canellakis played violin professionally before she conducted, including years in orchestras, and she tends to draw a warm, articulate string sound rather than a glossy one. Inner lines get pulled forward; you often hear a countermelody you did not know was there. The San Francisco program plays to that. Rachmaninoff's Symphonic Dances, written in 1940 and his last completed work, hides a saxophone solo in the first movement and closes with the old plainchant Dies irae, a death melody Rachmaninoff quoted all his life. Prokofiev's Second Violin Concerto opens with the soloist alone, unaccompanied, and ends with castanets clattering under a dance. Victoria Borisova-Ollas, a Russian born composer long resident in Sweden, writes atmospheric music built on slow, glowing washes of orchestral color.

Canellakis was born in New York to a musical family. She studied violin at the Curtis Institute of Music and later took a conducting degree at the Juilliard School. Before conducting full time she worked as a violinist, including a period playing with the Berlin Philharmonic through its orchestra academy, and spent several seasons in orchestral and chamber music work in the United States and Europe. She was an assistant conductor at the Dallas Symphony Orchestra, and in 2016 she received the Sir Georg Solti Conducting Award. She became chief conductor of the Netherlands Radio Philharmonic Orchestra in 2019, and has also held a principal guest conductor title with the Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra. In 2019 she conducted the Last Night of the BBC Proms, the first woman to do so.