Program Notes: Rachmaninoff and Mozart

NOVEMBER 11, 12 & 13 RACHMANINOFF AND MOZART FRIDAY November 11, 2016 – 8:00pm SATURDAY November 12, 2016 – 8:00pm SUNDAY November 13, 2016 – 2:00pm conductor Johannes Debus piano Joyce Yang

All performances at the Jacobs Music Center's Copley Symphony Hall This concert is made possible through the generosity of SoCal Pianos.

PROGRAM CHARLES TOMLINSON GRIFFES SERGEI RACHMANINOFF

The White Peacock Piano Concerto No. 2 in C minor, Op. 18 Moderato

Adagio sostenuto

Allegro scherzando

Joyce Yang, piano

INTERMISSION WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZART

Symphony No. 41 in C Major, K. 551: Jupiter

Allegro vivace

Andante cantabile Allegretto

Molto allegro

The approximate running time for this program, including intermission, is one hour and forty minutes.

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ABOUT THE ARTISTS

RACHMANINOFF AND MOZART - NOVEMBER 11, 12 & 13 Frankfurt Opera (The Cunning Little Vixen), the Blossom Festival with The Cleveland Orchestra and to the Aspen Summer Music Festival (Béatrice et Bénédict). With COC, he conducted the world première of Canadian Barbara Monk Feldman’s Pyramus and Thisbe, Wagner’s Siegfried and Mozart’s Le nozze di Figaro.

In 2016-17 Mr. Debus returns to the San Diego Symphony and debuts with the Metropolitan Opera (conducting Salome) and the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra.

JOHANNES DEBUS, CONDUCTOR

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O H ANNES DE BUS has been Music Director of the Canadian Opera Company (COC) since 2009, having been appointed immediately following his debut. He graduated from the Hamburg Conservatoire before being engaged as répétiteur and, subsequently, Kapellmeister

by Frankfurt Opera where he acquired an extensive repertoire from Mozart to Thomas Adès and worked closely with such conductors as Paolo Carignani, Markus Stenz and Sebastian Weigle. He recently returned to Frankfurt to conduct The Adventures of Mr. Broucek and Rusalka.

In 2015-16 he debuted with the Houston and San Diego symphonies and Komische Oper Berlin (Le nozze di Figaro) and returned to

At home in both contemporary music and the core repertoire, he has conducted a wide range of world premières and works of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, notably Salvatore Sciarrino's Macbeth and Luciano Berio's Un re in ascolto. He has collaborated with internationally-acclaimed ensembles such as Ensemble Intercontemporain, Ensemble Modern, Klangforum Wien and Musikfabrik.

He conducts regularly at the Bayerische Staatsoper Munich, Staatsoper unter den Linden Berlin and Frankfurt Opera and has appeared in new productions at English National Opera and Opéra National de Lyon. Other guest conducting engagements include the Nashville, New Jersey and Montreal symphonies and the National Arts Centre orchestra in Ottawa.

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He made his debut at the BBC Proms with Britten’s Sinfonia in September 2014, and he conducted a new production of The Tales of Hoffmann at the 2015 Bregenz Festival.

As a guest conductor, he has appeared at several international festivals such as the Biennale di Venezia, Bregenz and Schwetzingen Festivals, Festival d'Automne in Paris, Lincoln Center Festival, Ruhrtriennale, Suntory Summer Festival and Spoleto Festival. Mr. Debus enjoys an ongoing relationship with the Royal Conservatory of Music in Toronto.

In 2008 Mr. Debus conducted Prokofiev’s War and Peace for Canadian Opera Company.

Such was his success with the piece and rapport with the company that he was immediately offered the Music Directorship.

In 2010 Johannes Debus was invited to replace James Levine in a performance of Mozart’s Die Entführung aus dem Serail at Tanglewood with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, and he was subsequently invited to replace Sir Colin Davis in works by Mozart and Haydn in four subscription concerts, marking his Symphony Hall debut. He made his debut with The Cleveland Orchestra at the Blossom Music Festival in the summer of 2012 and with the Toronto Symphony and the Philharmonia in London in 2013. n

“WHAT’S THE SCORE?”

Join us 45 minutes before every Jacobs Masterworks concert for “What’s The Score?”, a fascinating 25-minute concert talk from the stage by San Diego Symphony Concert Commentator "Nuvi Mehta"!

HOME OF STEINWAY & SONS Proud sponsor of these performances featuring Steinway Artist JOYCE YANG, SoCal Pianos is honored to partner with the Symphony and to serve as the premier piano showroom in the region, located in the iconic Piano Building and Home of Steinway & Sons in San Marcos on Hwy 78.

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ABOUT THE ARTISTS

RACHMANINOFF AND MOZART - NOVEMBER 11, 12 & 13 Waart, Lorin Maazel, James Conlon, Manfred Honeck, Jacques Lacombe, Leonard Slatkin, David Robertson, Bramwell Tovey, Peter Oundjian and Jaap van Zweden. In recital, Ms. Yang has taken the stage at New York’s Lincoln Center and Metropolitan Museum; the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC; Chicago’s Symphony Hall; and Zurich’s Tonhalle.

JOYCE YANG, PIANO

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lessed with “poetic and sensitive pianism” (Washington Post) and a “wondrous sense of color” (San Francisco Classical Voice), pianist JOYCE YA NG captivates audiences with her virtuosity, lyricism and interpretive sensitivity. As a Van Cliburn International Piano Competition silver medalist and Avery Fisher Career Grant recipient, Ms. Yang showcases her colorful musical personality in solo recitals and collaborations with the world’s top orchestras and chamber musicians.

Ms. Yang came to international attention in 2005 when she won the silver medal at the 12th Van Cliburn International Piano Competition. The youngest contestant at 19 years old, she took home two additional awards: the Steven De Groote Memorial Award for Best Performance of Chamber Music (with the Takàcs Quartet) and the Beverley Taylor Smith Award for Best Performance of a New Work.

Since her spectacular debut, she has blossomed into an “astonishing artist” (Neue Zürcher Zeitung). She has performed as soloist with the New York Philharmonic, Chicago Symphony, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Philadelphia Orchestra, the Baltimore, Detroit, Houston, Milwaukee, Pittsburgh, San Francisco, Sydney and Toronto symphony orchestras, Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin and the BBC Philharmonic (among many others), working with such distinguished conductors as Edo de

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Highlights of Ms. Yang’s 2016-17 season include her debuts with the Minnesota Orchestra and San Diego Symphony, recitals in Anchorage, Beverly Hills, Cincinnati, Denver, Nashville, Seattle and at Spivey Hall in Georgia, and concerts with her frequent duo partner, violinist Augustin Hadelich, in Dallas, New York City, Saint Paul, San Francisco and more. She will also perform at Chamber Music International in Dallas with the Alexander String Quartet, with whom she has recorded the Brahms and Schumann Piano Quintets. Fall marks the release of her first collaboration with Hadelich for Avie Records as well as the world premiere recording of Michael Torke’s Piano Concerto, created expressly for her and commissioned by the Albany Symphony. Additional appearances showcasing her vast repertoire include performances as orchestral soloist in Arizona, California, Illinois, Michigan, New York, Ohio, Rhode Island and Texas. In Summer 2016 she appeared at the festivals of Aspen, Brevard, Lake Tahoe, Steamboat Springs and Sun Valley.

Recent season highlights include Ms. Yang’s debut with New Jersey Symphony on the occasion of Jacques Lacombe’s last concert as Music Director, multiple returns to the New York Philharmonic, Royal Flemish Philharmonic and Deutsches SymphonieOrchester Berlin debuts, her UK debut in the Cambridge International Piano Series, her Montreal debut with I Musici de Montréal with Jean-Marie Zeitouni and her Pittsburgh Symphony debut playing Schumann’s Concerto under music director Manfred Honeck. She concluded a fiveyear Rachmaninoff cycle with de Waart and the Milwaukee Symphony, to which she brought “an enormous palette of colors, and tremendous emotional depth” (Milwaukee Sentinel Journal); joined the Takács Quartet for Dvořák in Lincoln Center’s Great Performers series; and impressed The New York Times with her “vivid and beautiful playing” of Schubert’s Trout Quintet with members of the Emerson String Quartet at the Mostly Mozart Festival at Lincoln Center.

In 2014 Yang “demonstrated impressive gifts” (The New York Times) with a trio of album releases: her second solo disc for Avie Records, Wild Dreams, on which she plays

Schumann, Bartók, Hindemith, Rachmaninoff and arrangements by Earl Wild; a pairing of the Brahms and Schumann Piano Quintets with the Alexander Quartet; and a recording of Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1 with Denmark’s Odense Symphony Orchestra that International Record Review called “hugely enjoyable, beautifully shaped…a performance that marks her out as an enormous talent.” Of her 2011 debut album for Avie Records, Collage, featuring works

by Scarlatti, Liebermann, Debussy, Currier and Schumann, Gramophone praised her “imaginative programming” and “beautifully atmospheric playing.”

Born in 1986 in Seoul, South Korea, Ms. Yang received her first piano lesson from her aunt at the age of four. She quickly took to the instrument, which she received as a birthday present, and over the next few years won several national piano competitions in her native country. By the age of ten, she had entered the School of Music at the Korea National University of Arts, and she went on to make a number of concerto and recital appearances in Seoul and Daejeon. In 1997 Yang moved to the United States to begin studies at the pre-college division of the Juilliard School with Dr. Yoheved Kaplinsky.

During her first year at Juilliard, Ms. Yang won the pre-college division Concerto Competition, resulting in a performance of Haydn’s Keyboard Concerto in D with the Juilliard Pre-College Chamber Orchestra.

After winning the Philadelphia Orchestra’s Greenfield Student Competition, she performed Prokofiev’s Third Piano Concerto with that orchestra at just 12 years old. She graduated from Juilliard with special honor as the recipient of the school’s 2010 Arthur Rubinstein Prize, and in 2011 she won its 30th Annual William A. Petschek Piano Recital Award.

Ms. Yang made her celebrated New York Philharmonic debut with Maazel at Avery Fisher Hall in November 2006 and performed on the orchestra’s tour of Asia, making a triumphant return to her hometown of Seoul, South Korea. Subsequent appearances with the Philharmonic included the opening night of the Leonard Bernstein Festival in September 2008, at the special request of Maazel in his final season as music director. The New York Times pronounced her performance in Bernstein’s The Age of Anxiety a “knockout.”

Joyce Yang appears in the film In the Heart of Music, a documentary about the 2005 Van Cliburn International Piano Competition.

She is a Steinway artist. n

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ABOUT THE MUSIC

RACHMANINOFF AND MOZART - NOVEMBER 11, 12 & 13 The White Peacock C H A RL E S TO M L I N S ON G R IFFES Born September 17, 1884, Elmira, NY Died April 8, 1920, New York City

Where the pomegranate

Like Mozart, American composer Charles Griffes died a few months short of his 36th birthday. His death deprived American music of a major talent and probably deprived American music of a number of major works.

A prodigy as a boy, Griffes had intended to make his career as a virtuoso pianist, and at age 19 he went to Berlin to study piano at the Stern Academy. But the lure of composition proved too strong, and in Berlin Griffes studied privately with Humperdinck before returning to the United States in 1907. He became director of music at the Hackley School, a private school for boys in Tarrytown, New York, and remained there for the rest of his brief life. Griffes’ music evolved quickly: at first influenced by the music of Brahms and Strauss, he quickly fell under the spell of the exotic new sounds composers were producing in the early years of the twentieth century. The first of these influences was the impressionism of Debussy and Ravel, but Griffes was soon drawn to the sensuality of Scriabin and to the music of the Far East, a fascination that would also captivate Szymanowski and many other composers in these years.

Dream through the noontides . . .

Under these influences, Griffes composed a set of four piano pieces in 1915-16 that he published as his Roman Sketches, Opus 7.

The White Peacock was the first movement of Roman Sketches, and – recognizing the possibilities in this music – Griffes quickly arranged it for orchestra, transforming his piano piece into a tone poem. Leopold Stokowski gave the first performance of the orchestral version with the Philadelphia Orchestra on December 19, 1919, and it has become one of Griffes’ best-known works.

Each of the pieces in Roman Sketches was prefaced by a quotation from the poetry of the Scottish novelist and poet William Sharp (1855-1905), one of Griffes’ favorite writers.

Sharp was a complex personality: attracted to mysticism and to the pre-Raphaelite movement, he published much of his work under the pen-name Fiona Macleod. Sharp’s The White Peacock draws us into a world of exotic color and atmosphere, and the poem – which is published in the score of The White Peacock – begins: Here where the sunlight Floodeth the garden,

Reareth its glory Of gorgeous blossom; Where the oleanders Into this sunny world Moves the white peacock, as tho’ through the noontide A dream of the moonlight were real for a moment.

Dim on the beautiful fan that he spreadeth . . .

Griffes attempts to re-create some of this sultry, sensual, surreal atmosphere in his music. From the first instant we drift into a world of harmonic suspension, where rhythms are fluid and colors flicker and change. This music may originally have been composed for the piano, but it seems to cry out for orchestral color, and Griffes enlivens it with solo flourishes for oboe, clarinet and flute; those solo colors contrast with the sound of two harps and celeste and the string section, which is sometimes muted, sometimes not.

There is no drama in this music, it does not tell a story, nor is there any real progression.

We suddenly find ourselves in a world of blinding sunlight, opulent colors and sensual sound. The White Peacock drifts into silence on an enigmatic, understated ending that leaves some of the exotic atmosphere of Sharp’s poem hovering in the air around us. n

Piano Concerto No. 2 in C minor, Op. 18 SER G EI RAC HMANI NOF F Born April 1, 1873, Oneg, Novgorod Died March 28, 1943, Beverly Hills Rachmaninoff’s Second Piano Concerto may be the best-loved piano concerto on the planet, but it almost did not get written, and the tale of its creation is one of the most remarkable in all of music. Rachmaninoff graduated from the Moscow Conservatory in 1892 with its highest award, the gold medal, and quickly embarked on a career as a touring pianist. But he wanted to compose.

He had written a piano concerto while still a conservatory student, and early in 1895 the 22-year-old composer took on the most challenging of orchestral compositions, a symphony. The premiere of that symphony, on March 27, 1897, was a catastrophe. Conductor Alexander Glazunov was unprepared (some

said drunk), the orchestra played badly, and young Rachmaninoff saw the disaster coming.

Unwilling to enter the hall, he sat hunched in a stairwell of the auditorium with his fists clenched against the sides of his head. Inside, it was as bad as he feared: audience and critics alike hated the music, César Cui describing it as a “program symphony on the Seven Plagues of Egypt… [music that would give] acute delight to the inhabitants of Hell.” What should have been a moment of triumph for the young composer instead brought humiliation.

Rachmaninoff may have been a powerful performer, but he was a vulnerable personality, and the disaster of the premiere plunged into a deep depression. His first act was to destroy the score to the symphony. It was never performed again during his lifetime, but after his death it was reassembled from the orchestral parts, and the painful irony is that his First Symphony is now admired as one of the finest works of his youth. But in the aftermath of the fiasco of its premiere, Rachmaninoff lost confidence in himself; for the next three years he wrote no music at all.

Alarmed, the composer’s family and friends arranged for him to see Dr. Nicholas Dahl, an internal medicine specialist who sometimes treated patients through hypnosis. Dahl was also an extremely cultured man – he was an amateur cellist – and Rachmaninoff’s friends were hopeful that contact with such a man would improve the composer’s spirits. During a lengthy series of visits, the composer heard a steady message of encouragement from the doctor: “You will begin to write your concerto…You will work with great facility…

The concerto will be of excellent quality.”

To the composer’s astonishment, Dahl’s treatment worked. He later said: “Although it may sound incredible, this cure really helped me. By the beginning of summer I again began to compose. The material grew in bulk, and new musical ideas began to stir within me – more than enough for my concerto.” With the dam broken, new music rushed out of the rejuvenated composer. Across the summer and fall of 1900, Rachmaninoff composed what became the second and third movements of his Second Piano Concerto. These were performed successfully that December, and Rachmaninoff composed the opening movement the following spring. The first performance of the complete concerto, in Moscow on November 9, 1901, was a triumph.

Not surprisingly, Rachmaninoff dedicated the concerto to Dr. Dahl.

ABOUT THE MUSIC

RACHMANINOFF AND MOZART - NOVEMBER 11, 12 & 13 The very beginning of the concerto seems so “right” that it is hard to believe that this movement was written last. Throughout his life Rachmaninoff loved the sound of Russian church bells. He once noted: “The sound of church bells dominated all the cities of Russia I used to know – Novgorod, Kiev, Moscow.

They accompanied every Russian from childhood to the grave, and no composer could escape their influence…All my life I have taken pleasure in the differing moods and music of gladly chiming or mournfully tolling bells…” Rachmaninoff’s Second Piano Concerto begins with the sound of those bells, as – all alone – the solo piano echoes their tolling. Into that swirling sound, the orchestra stamps out the impassioned main theme, one of those powerful Slavic melodies that instantly haunt the mind; the solo piano has the yearning second subject. This music demands a pianist of extraordinary ability (this is one of the most difficult concertos in the literature), and Rachmaninoff writes with imagination throughout this movement: the orchestra reprises the main theme beneath the soloist’s dancing chordal accompaniment, while the solo horn recalls the second subject in a haunting passage marked dolce.

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A soft chorale for muted strings introduces the Adagio sostenuto, but – in a wonderful touch – the solo flute sings the main theme as the pianist accompanies. The theme is repeated, first by the clarinet and then the strings, growing more elaborate as it proceeds, and only then is the piano allowed to take the lead. A brief but spectacular cadenza leads to a recall of the tolling bells from the very beginning and a quiet close.

The Allegro scherzando begins quietly as well, but this march-like opening is full of suppressed rhythmic energy. Rachmaninoff makes effective contrast between the orchestra’s opening – powerful but controlled with an almost military precision – and the piano’s entrance, which explodes with an extraordinary wildness. The second theme, broadly sung by the violas, has become one of those Big Tunes for which Rachmaninoff was famous. Unfortunately, this wonderful melody would become an inspiration for countless Hollywood composers and – many years later – it was used to set the words “Full moon and empty arms.” If one can escape those associations and listen with fresh ears, this remains lovely music, a reminder of Rachmaninoff’s considerable melodic gift.

The concerto rushes to its conclusion on a no-holds-barred coda (another Rachmaninoff specialty) that resounds in every measure with the young composer’s recently-restored health. n

Symphony No. 41 in C Major, K. 551: Jupiter WOLFGANG AMADEUS MOZ ART Born January 27, 1756, Salzburg Died December 5, 1791, Vienna The summer of 1788 was an exceptionally difficult time for Mozart, and what must have been particularly dismaying for the composer was the suddenness of his fall from grace. Two years earlier, at the premiere of The Marriage of Figaro, he had been at the summit of the musical world. On a visit to Prague, he could exult “For here they talk about nothing but ‘Figaro.’ Nothing is played, sung, or whistled but ‘Figaro.’” But the indifferent reception of Don Giovanni and evolving musical fashions in Vienna changed this. Within a year Mozart discovered that his audience in Vienna had nearly disappeared: he was unable to mount new concerts or sell music by subscription because now no one seemed interested. Soon

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ABOUT THE MUSIC

RACHMANINOFF AND MOZART - NOVEMBER 11, 12 & 13 he found his financial condition straitened, and he began to borrow heavily. The composer moved his family to a smaller apartment in a suburb of Vienna, where there was at least the consolation of a garden and lower rent, but he remained despondent about his situation.

On June 27 he wrote to his friend Michael Puchberg, asking for a loan and admitting that “black thoughts…often come to me, thoughts I push away with a tremendous effort.” Two days later, Mozart’s infant daughter Theresia died.

Through that bleak summer, Mozart worked with incredible speed, and – after an eighteen-month pause – he was writing symphonies. He finished the Symphony No. 39 on June 26, the Symphony No. 40 on July 25, and a bare sixteen days after that (!) the Symphony No. 41. The question remains: why did he write these symphonies? Mozart usually wrote music only when performances were planned, but there is no record of any subscription concerts during this period.

Perhaps such concerts were planned and then fell through. In any case, these symphonies were not performed and instead went onto the composer’s shelf. Evidence suggests that he heard the Symphony No. 40 at a concert in April 1791, but at the time of his death eight months later he had likely not heard a note of the Symphony No. 39 or the Symphony No. 41.

The Symphony No 41 in C Major was his last, though there is no reason to believe that he knew when writing it that it would be his final symphony, for a normal lifetime would have allowed the composer several more decades

of work. The nickname “Jupiter” was not Mozart’s. It was in use by the early nineteenth century, but its exact origin is unknown, despite many theories. This is, however, one of those rare instances when an inauthentic nickname makes sense; if ever there were Olympian music, this is it.

The first movement – Allegro vivace – is music of genuine grandeur, built on a wealth of thematic material, and we feel that breadth from the first instant, where the opening theme divides into two quite distinct phrases.

The first phrase is an almost stern motto of repeated triplets, but the second is lyric and graceful, and the fusion of these two elements within the same theme suggests by itself the emotional scope of the opening movement.

The array of material in this movement ranges from an almost military power to an elegant lyricism. One of its themes, in fact, is derived from an aria Mozart had written for a friend a few months earlier. The development is brief (and concerned largely with this aria theme), but the recapitulation is quite lengthy, and Mozart surprises us by bringing back some of it in a minor key. The movement drives to a stirring close in which its martial spirit prevails.

The second movement is marked Andante cantabile, and Mozart’s stipulation cantabile (a marking he used infrequently) is important, for this music sounds as if it too might be an aria from an opera. First violins, muted throughout, introduce both themes of this sonata-form movement. The opening seems at first all silky lyricism, but Mozart jolts this peace with unexpected attacks. The second subject is turbulent: over quiet triplet

accompaniment, the violin line rises and falls in a series of intensely chromatic phrases, powered by the syncopated shape of this theme. The third movement is in minuet-andtrio form, though no one has ever danced to this brisk music, whose fluid lines are spiced by attacks from brass and timpani. The trio section is dominated by the sound of the solo oboe, though near its end strings break into a gentle little waltz that suddenly stops in mid-air.

The Molto allegro finale is not simply one of Mozart's finest movements, it is one of the most impressive pieces of music ever written. It begins with a four-note phrase heard immediately in the first violins, yet this figure is hardly new: Mozart had used it in his Missa Brevis in F Major of 1774, his String Quartet in G Major of 1782, and elsewhere. In fact, he had subtly prepared us for the finale by slipping this opening phrase into the trio section of the third movement. The finale is not – as many have suggested – a fugue, but is instead a sonata-form movement that puts that opening four-note phrase (and other material) through extensive fugal treatment.

However dazzling Mozart’s treatment of his material is in the development section, nothing can prepare the listener for the coda.

Horns sound the four-note opening motto, and in some of the most brilliant polyphonic writing to be found anywhere Mozart pulls all his themes together in magnificent five-part counterpoint as the symphony hurtles to its close in a blaze of brass and timpani. n PROGRAM NOTES BY ERIC BROMBERGER

PERFORMANCE HISTORY

by Melvin G. Goldzband, Symphony Archivist The White Peacock, by Charles Tomlinson Griffes, has been played by this Orchestra only once before when Robert Shaw conducted it during the summer season of 1957. The Rachmaninoff Second Piano Concerto, these days perhaps the most popular of all piano concertos, was also introduced here by Robert Shaw, coincidentally leading it during the same program that featured The White Peacock, in 1957.

George Sementovsky was the soloist at that time. This program represents the fifteenth time it has been played here. Jahja Ling, with Lang Lang, had given its most recent performances here during the 2013-14 season immediately prior to the Orchestra's tour to New York and China. (Lang Lang also performed the work with the Orchestra on the occasion of the SDSO’s sold out Carnegie Hall debut on that stop in New York on October 29, 2013.)

Mozart's aptly-named Jupiter Symphony, the acme of his symphonic compositions, was first played by the San Diego Symphony Orchestra under the baton of David Atherton, during the 1983-84 season. Before the current performances, there have been seven presentations, most recently under Jahja Ling during the 2010-11 season. n

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anyone else invited to our podium by attending all rehearsals, scores in hand, constantly determining the balances that can’t necessarily be heard by the conductor onstage but would be clarified by Sameer listening carefully in the auditorium. There is also a plethora of other duties: public relations aspects such as TV appearances and addressing retirement communities, as well as working directly with students in schools throughout our area. Outreach is, of course, a primary effort here at the San Diego Symphony.

Sameer is a happy San Diegan, married for the past three years to a young lady he met at a music festival in Arkansas, but who is a native of our own east county. Currently, she is in a graduate social work program at San Diego State, specializing in geriatrics. Her own musical background was mainly in vocal music. In her undergraduate program at the University of San Diego, she was in the Choral Scholars Program.

Surprisingly, Sameer did not come from a musical family. Both of his parents were born in Kenya where, like much of east Africa, there is a large Indian population. They came to the United States and his father started a residency at Wayne State University Medical School in Detroit. (The senior Mr. Patel still practices internal medicine and geriatrics.) Sameer was born in Detroit. He has one older brother, a recipient of an MBA degree from Rice University, who works in the energy sector in Houston.

SAMEER PATEL, ASSOCIATE CONDUCTOR

SA M E E R PATE L ,

OUR ASS OCIATE CONDUCTOR

Dr. Melvin G.Goldzband, Archivist San Diego Symphony Orchestra Beginning his second season here, first as assistant conductor and now as associate conductor, SAMEER PATE L, the orchestra and the audiences are enjoying each other greatly. He came here from his previous three-year assistant conductorship with the Fort Wayne Philharmonic in Indiana, his first professional position. For the post he won in San Diego, there were 175 applicants!

He has been kept quite busy here, conducting the education concerts, family concerts, occasional pops and family concerts, as well as a variety of special events. (One of his first assignments was conducting the San Diego Symphony Orchestra for the now-legendary surprise “Star Wars Concert” at our summer site during last year’s Comic-Con pop culture convention.)

Primarily, of course, he backs up our music director and

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The family settled in Port Huron, Michigan, where Sameer grew up happily with a “typical” small town childhood, and where he was provided with piano lessons. In middle school and high school, he played alto saxophone in the school bands. It was a high school music teacher who really got Sameer more involved in music, lending him classical CDs that he enjoyed a great deal.

“It was when I first heard the Mahler Second Symphony that I knew I really wanted to be a conductor!” he told me.

For three summers Sameer attended the Interlochen Music Camp, where he continued his piano studies but, of course, also heard plenty of other music. After that, it seemed natural for him to attend the University of Michigan, where he eventually received his master's degree in music. He would frequently drive to Detroit where he would hear the Detroit Symphony, often attending their rehearsals. Meanwhile, he also often went to Europe, studying in workshops and master classes and polishing his chosen trade under various conductors.

Everyone who has observed Sameer on the podium, leading programs during which he has the chance to make comments about the music or associated material, has remarked positively about his stage manner; it is relatively free, very communicative and clearly understandable. He certainly seems happy to be there between the orchestra and the audience. We are happy that he's there, too, sharing his winning personality as well as his manifold talents.

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