For immediate release · Media contact: Spencer Hannibal-Smith, Executive Director · spencer@tahoesymphony.com · 775-525-9855
Tahoe Symphony Orchestra & Chorus Names Hannah von Wiehler Artistic Director and Principal Conductor
American-born, Moscow-raised, Georgetown- and Oxford-trained conductor begins a three-year tenure (2026–2029) with a debut season, HUMAN, exploring what it means to be human in the age of artificial intelligence
"After an extensive search, we found in Hannah a rare combination of artistic excellence, visionary leadership, and genuine warmth," said Kate Brown, President of the Board of Directors. "She will guide TOCCATA into an exciting new chapter, with fresh and innovative programming, while honoring the traditions our community holds dear."
A conductor whose work spans Europe, the United States, and Asia, von Wiehler was born to American parents and raised in Moscow, where she trained as a violinist at the State Tchaikovsky Conservatoire before reading Russian Literature at Georgetown University. She served as personal assistant to Valery Gergiev at the Mariinsky Theatre, earned her doctorate at the University of Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, and for eight years led the United Kingdom's Orchestra VOX in more than one hundred concerts, operas, and multimedia works of her own design. Recent seasons have brought her debut at Carnegie Hall and engagements with Italy's Filarmonica Arturo Toscanini, the Orchestra Sinfonica Siciliana, and the Opéra National de Bordeaux. She is among a small number of American women building international conducting careers at this level.
Von Wiehler's vision for TOCCATA rests on a single conviction: that an orchestra is strongest when it is deeply rooted in its community. "I want TOCCATA to be an archipelago, not an island," she said, "connected, through genuine partnerships, to the schools, museums, dance studios, and lakeside towns that make this region what it is. In a divided age, music remains one of the few things that can hold very different people in one room. That may be the most valuable thing we offer."
"A strong local identity and a wider, even global, appeal are not in tension. One grows from the other," she added. "My hope is that, over time, TOCCATA becomes to the Tahoe region what the great orchestras are to their cities: treasured at home, and admired well beyond it. We are just at the beginning of that journey, and I could not be more thrilled to make it with this community."
Von Wiehler's debut season, titled HUMAN, asks what it means to be human in the age of artificial intelligence, a season, she notes, "not about AI itself, but about the ancient question of who we are." Its centerpiece is a four-concert signature series, BODY, ELEMENTS, MIND, and SOUL, performed alongside the traditions that anchor the orchestra's year, including Handel's Messiah and a summer spectacular, Rhapsody in Silver. The season also brings Tahoe its first opera, an outdoor production of Puccini's Madama Butterfly at the water's edge, and introduces two new competitions, a Concerto Prize and a Composition Prize, created to lift up local talent.
About TOCCATA / Tahoe Symphony Orchestra & Chorus. TOCCATA is a professional orchestra and chorus serving the Reno–Lake Tahoe region since 2005, presenting a full season of orchestral and choral concerts in intimate venues across Incline Village, Reno, Carson Valley, Truckee, and South Lake Tahoe.