Shi-Yeon Sung
The cheerful young woman conducting the Milwaukee Symphony this weekend knew at age 4 that she would be a musician.
Shi-Yeon Sung
“My mother has told me that one day I came home from playing outside and said I wanted to play the piano,” Sung said, in a post-rehearsal interview late Wednesday afternoon. “She thought I was too young, but she always supported me. She took me to the teacher in our town (Pusan, South Korea), and the teacher said I had talent.”
So mother bought her a piano. Daughter never looked back. She won competition after competition in Korea and gave her first solo recital at 13.
Sung graduated from an arts high school and was off to Europe, with her parents’ blessing.
“Korea is a great place to learn music, but there are always limits,” she said. “I always wanted to go outside and learn the language and the culture behind the music. Music and language are related. Wagner wrote that after you recite his texts 30 times, you are ready to sing it.”
To a young girl enchanted with European Romantic music, that meant Germany. She had read about the University of the Arts, Berlin, in a magazine. Sung, 34, graduated from that institution in 2001, with a master’s degree in piano performance. Shortly after, she turned her focus to conducting. Her podium debut was Mozart’s “The Magic Flute” in Berlin in 2002. By 2003, she was chief conductor of the orchestra of the Humboldt University-Berlin. After advanced studies in conducting at the Royal College Music in Stockholm and earning a certificate at the Hanns Eisler School in Berlin, she made a splash on the competition circuit. The biggest was the top prize in the 2006 Solti Conducting Competition.
She is in the final season of a two-year stint as an assistant with the Boston Symphony. That’s been a nice launching pad for branching out in America.
“I’m the first female staff conductor at the BSO,” she said. “And just the fifth female, including guest conductors.”
Classical music is an old-fashioned business, and women on the podium are rare. Sung thinks gender might put a ceiling on her career.
A bit of Sung rehearsing Copland’s “Appalachian Spring” with the Boston Symphony, from WBUR, Boston:
“It’s still very hard, sometimes women are not respected so much, as leaders,” she said. “But in some ways, it’s very attractive to have a women on the podium. Everything depends on the situation. Or on luck.”
I should say that all of this was spoken without a hint of bitterness, in words punctuated by smiles and bright laughter. They were coming from a woman for whom the sky seems to be the limit.
Sung will lead the MSO in the Overture to Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro and Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 11. She will work with soloist Jeremy Denk in Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 27. MSO management suggested the program, and Sung was happy to oblige.
I asked what she most wants to convey in the 11th Symphony, which is loaded with Russian folk and Revolutionary songs and explicitly about the end of the monarchy and the rise of the Soviets.
“Shostakovich always has the revolutionary fighting soul,” she said. “He wanted to show the whole panorama of history. He’s never satisfied with the situation as it is. The music represents the soul of the Revolution, and in the fourth movement he would raise the people to fight again.”
As to Mozart’s overture:
“It’s just five minutes, but the whole opera story is in there.”
To Sung, the themes and gestures represent characters in the comedy. To illustrate, she sang those needling intervals of the second that keep cropping up. That’s Figaro, finding ways to stick it to the Count.
More generally, she spoke of the local, Austrian inflections of Mozart’s music, and sang to illustrate how subtleties of Austrian German helped to shape musical inflections. She’s really thought this stuff through.
She’s also thinking through her career, which at present is a whirlwind of guest engagements.
“I’m at the BSO through next summer,” Sung said. “After that, I would love to have an orchestra, where I know them and they know me. It would maybe be in Europe. I grew up there. My spirit grew up there.”
Concert times are 11:15 a.m. Friday and 8 p.m. Saturday, Nov. 6-7, at Marcus Center Uihlein Hall, 929 N. Water St. Tickets are $24-$77 Friday and $25-$93 Saturday. Call the MSO ticket line, 414 291-7605, visit the MSO web site, or call the Marcus box office, 414 273-7206.
