18-year-old cellist Starla Breshears joins San Francisco Symphony in 2026

Starla Breshears will step into Davies Symphony Hall next season as something uncommon even for one of the city’s most storied institutions: an 18-year-old cellist joining the San Francisco Symphony as its youngest musician.

The Symphony said Breshears will enter the cello section in the 2026-27 season, and that it cannot confirm whether she is the youngest player ever in the orchestra’s 114-season history. Even so, her arrival is a vivid marker of how San Francisco’s classical-music pipeline can carry a student from pre-college training to the professional stage, with the San Francisco Conservatory of Music at the center of that path.

Breshears studied at the Conservatory’s Pre-College Academy from 2015 to 2025 on a Joseph Chan Scholarship, then moved on to the Colburn Music Academy in Los Angeles as a Kohl Scholar, where she studies with Clive Greensmith. She began cello at age 3 with Yoshie Muratani and later received coaching from Christine Walevska and Sergei Riabtchenko. Along the way, she added major summer training at Yellow Barn Young Artists, Greenwood Music Camp and Accademia Musicale Chigiana.

The Symphony said Principal Cello Rainer Eudeikis praised Breshears for her “exceptional musicianship and facility,” saying she stood out during both her blind audition and her trial with the orchestra. He added that she showed “great assurance and professionalism.” Those are the qualities that can separate a gifted young player from a working orchestral musician, especially in a section as technically demanding as the cello desk.

Breshears has already spent years inside San Francisco’s musical institutions. She said Davies Symphony Hall has long inspired her, and that it is a place where she made many memories through the San Francisco Symphony Youth Orchestra and the San Francisco Choral Society. She served as principal cello of the Youth Orchestra in the 2024-25 season and as assistant principal cello in the Choral Society.

Her resume reaches well beyond the Bay Area. Breshears has soloed with 18 orchestras since age 6 and has been a prizewinner in both the Stulberg International String Competition and the Johansen International Competition. Her appointment also points back to the orchestra’s own feeder system: the San Francisco Symphony Youth Orchestra, founded in 1981 and tuition-free for musicians ages 12 to 21, has long been one of the city’s most visible routes into elite classical performance.

For the Symphony, which gave its first concerts in December 1911, Breshears’ arrival is more than a personnel move. It is a reminder that in San Francisco, major arts careers are still being shaped in local classrooms, rehearsal rooms and youth ensembles long before they reach the main stage.