Sunday, March 9, 2025
3:00 PM EST

Toby Oft is the 12th principal trombone in the history of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Occupying the J.P. and Mary B. Barger Chair, he was appointed in 2008 by then-music director James Levine. Currently in his ninth season with the BSO, he has performed both as a soloist with the orchestra and as a chamber musician with the Boston Symphony Chamber Players. Oft previously held principal trombone positions with the San Diego Symphony, Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra, and Sarasota Orchestra. International career highlights as a concerto soloist have included acclaimed performances of such works as Launy Grøndahl’s Concerto for Trombone and Ferdinand David’s Concertino for Trombone with a diverse variety of ensembles on several continents. Domestic solo performances range from Gunther Schuller’s virtuosic Eine Kleine Posaunenmusik with “Pershing’s Own” U.S. Army Band in Washington, D.C., to Leopold Mozart’s rarely-performed Serenade in D for Trumpet, Alto Trombone, and Orchestra with the Boston Classical Orchestra. Deeply committed to education, Oft has presented master classes and recitals around the world. Here at home, he is on the faculty at New England Conservatory and Boston University. During the summer, he coaches at Tanglewood Music Center and is a frequent guest teacher and performer at Boston University Tanglewood Institute. In addition to prominent military band and teaching positions, Oft’s students have won tenured positions in top orchestras in Detroit, Jacksonville, Toronto, and Puerto Rico, and have also been accepted to such distinguished festivals as the Verbier Festival and Tanglewood Music Center. As an Edwards Instruments performing artist, Oft helped design the new T350-HB tenor trombone model and has his own exclusive line of tenor and alto trombone mouthpieces with Griego Mouthpieces. In spring 2014, Oft released his debut album, “First Look.” To pay tribute to the legacy of the great Joannes Rochut — a former principal trombone of the BSO — Oft is currently recording all the Rochut Etudes in HD video for YouTube students worldwide.

Japanese-American conductor Ken Yanagisawa is the Assistant Conductor of the Boston Civic Symphony and is currently pursuing a Doctor of Musical Arts degree in Orchestral Conducting at Boston University under the guidance of James Burton. He will be making his Japanese debut as a guest conductor for a production of Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte with Kansai Nikikai and the Japan Century Symphony Orchestra at the Hyogo Performing Arts Center Japan in February 2023, and most recently served as assistant conductor for the BU Opera Institute productions of Ned Rorem’s Our Town and Mozart’s Così fan tutte as well as for the BU Symphony Orchestra & Symphonic Chorus performance of Brahms’s Ein Deutsches Requiem at Boston Symphony Hall.

Previously, Ken completed a research residency at the Kyoto City University of Arts and received a Master of Music and Professional Studies Certificate in Orchestral Conducting from the Manhattan School of Music. While a student at MSM, he was selected to participate in the Manhattan School of Music / Leonard Slatkin Conductors Project and was subsequently invited to work with the Detroit Symphony Orchestra as a Conducting Fellow in March 2020. He also holds a Bachelor of Arts in Music from Yale University where he received the Joseph Lentilhon Selden Memorial Award and the Stanton Wheeler Award, and prior to Yale he attended the New England Conservatory as an Undergraduate Diploma candidate for Oboe Performance under the tutelage of John Ferrillo.