01.05.2007 - musicalamerica.com
Women Shine at the Bamberg Competition
BERLIN. - Her name doesn't exactly roll trippingly off the Anglophone tongue, but you might well practice it: Shi-yeon Sung. This 32-year-old South Korean has just won the German competition for young conductors that three years ago blasted Venezuela's Gustavo Dudamel, the Los Angeles Philharmonic's next conductor, into orbit. Well before Bamberg, James Levine had signed Sung as assistant conductor with his Boston Symphony, starting this October.
The jury may well have wound up in a figurative knock-down-drag-out before they could reach agreement and make their announcement on April 27, when they kept us observers cooling our heels for a solid two hours beyond schedule before they emerged. No first prize; the top winner Shi-yeon Sung received second prize. Third went to California-born Benjamin Shwartz,Assistant Conductor of the San Francisco Symphony and conductor of that city's Youth Orchestra, and fourth to Poland's Ewa Strusinska.
Shwartz's emerging outnumbered two to one by female colleagues enhances this contest's news value in a way unprecedented in my experience. Naturally I accede to the democratic vote of the jury, but I feel obliged at least to mention that I myself found Strusinska, 31, most impressive of all. That jury comprised 11 experts, among them Sweden's Herbert Blomstedt (who bears the title Honorary Conductor of this orchestra), from California Ernest Fleishmann and Peter Pastreich, from Austria via Texas Hans Graf, conductor of the Houston Symphony, this orchestra's English chief conductor Jonathan Nott, his compatriot Mark-Anthony Turnage, from whom the orchestra had commissioned a competition piece, and the eponymous composer's Spoleto-based grand-daughter Marina Mahler an honorary member.
As they did three years ago, the Bambergers had a huge rear-projection screen on the right side of the stage down front, enabling us in the audience to see exactly what the orchestra members saw, and for me Strusinska's face and eyes - uniquely important in conveying musical intentions from conductor to orchestra - expressed noticeably more than did any of the other 14 finalists winnowed down from 224 applicants from 40 countries.
Asia's tradition of inscrutability may well explain Sung's comparative impassivity, but her imminent American duties may well make it advisable for her to put a bit of thought on this. No matter what she conducted in the final round - part of Mahler's First Symphony plus selected Mahler orchestral songs, with the 31-year-old German baritone Michael Nagy from the Frankfurt Opera a hardy soloist for all the finalists - her facial expression and eyes transmitted little. Even so, she manifest mature control over the case-hardened pros before her.
Comparatively small Bamberg has only 70,000 residents, but clearly they revel in claiming one of today's finest symphony orchestras, the Bamberger Symphoniker, upon which the Bavarian state government has bestowed the additional name Bavarian State Philharmonic. The anomaly of such a splendid orchestra in such a comparatively small settlement derives from the central European turmoil that followed Nazi Germany's defeat in 1945. In imperial times, German-speaking Europeans dominated that area, and at the end of World War II violent anti-German racism understandably burgeoned in lands where Hitler's mass-murderers had reigned supreme. That meant many top-flight German musicians there found it prudent to relocate westward, and that impromptu pool from Czechoslovakia and Poland gave birth to the Bamberg Symphony. Since 2000 England's outstanding young Jonathan Nott has served as its conductor.
Shi-yeon Sung hales from Pusan, but she has had plenty of training in Europe. She first studied piano in Zurich, then at Berlin's University of the Arts. She began her conducting training only six years ago, at erstwhile East Berlin's Musikhochschule named after Hanns Eisler, Arnold Schoenberg's pro-Communist pupil (perhaps best remembered today for the first-rate national anthem he composed for the Soviet-dominated German Democratic Republic). Last year she also began training with Jorma Panula, the teaching wizard who has trained virtually every Finnish conductor active today. Her biggest victory prior to Bamberg came last year, when she won first prize in Frankfurt's Georg Solti International Competition.
It warmed one's heart to observe the ardor of Bamberg's populace toward this competition; they attended even the second round in impressive numbers (stoutly defending personal favorites during intermissions with a fervor customarily reserved for Fussball), and for the final round they virtually packed Bamberg's architecturally magnificent riverbank Konzerthalle. Among them the three laureates divided 35,000 Euros ($47,734), but the prestige of even placing as a finalist in such a major competition makes such extras mere icing on the cake.
Paul Moor, 1 May 2007