Princeton Symphony Orchestra
Guest Conductors for 2007-2008 Classical Series

SHI-YEON SUNG

To open the 2007-2008 season, the orchestra brings to the podium a young woman conductor of great promise. SHI-YEON SUNG, a 32-year-old South Korean, will conduct the Princeton Symphony Orchestra on September 30, 2007 in a concert of music by Brahms, Mozart, and Schumann. Praised for her impressive discipline and cool headedness, Shi-Yeon Sung won the top prize at the famed Mahler competition for young conductors this spring, the same competition which launched Gustavo Dudamel on a path to becoming Los Angeles Philharmonic's next Music Director. Immediately following her performance in Princeton, Sung will begin her appointment as Assistant Conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra.

Shi-Yeon Sung was born in 1975 in Pusan and studied piano first in Zurich and then at the Berlin “Universität der Künste.” In 2001, she took up conducting studies with Rolf Reuter at the “Hochschule für Musik Hanns Eisler” in Berlin. Shi-Yeon Sung is the winner of the 2006 Sir Georg Solti International Conductors' Competition, the Conducting Forum of the German Music Council, and the 2004 Female Conductors' Competition in Solingen, Germany. In 2002, Sung gave her conducting debut with Die Zauberflцte in Berlin and now regularly directs the opening concert of the Summer Festival Kapfenburg. She has since collaborated with the Berliner Sinfonie-Orchester, the Berliner Symphoniker, the Nьrnberger Symphoniker, and the Brandenburger Symphoniker.

This season Ms. Sung will make her Korean conducting debut opening the season for the Seoul Philharmonic Orchestra. In the next seasons, she will also make her subscription debuts with the Boston Symphony, the Rotterdam Philharmonic, the Milwaukee Symphony, the Elgin Symphony, and the Heidelberg Philharmonische Orchester.

JENS GEORG BACHMANN

PSO’s November program, entitled The Colors of Russia, will be conducted by JENS GEORG BACHMANN and will include music by Korngold, Tchaikovsky, Shostakovich, and the American premier of a work by the young Russian composer, Vicoria Borisova-Ollas. A protégé of James Levine, Jens Georg Bachmann is considered one of the most interesting and exciting conductors of his generation. Bachmann was Assistant Conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra for three seasons, beginning in 2004. During this appointment, he conducted the Boston Symphony Orchestra in subscription concerts and at Tanglewood. It was his responsibility to step in for BSO’s injured Music Director James Levine in March, 2006. Mr. Bachmann is currently a Conductor at the Metropolitan Opera in New York. He previously served as Assistant Conductor to the Music Director at the Munich Philharmonic, a position especially created for him in 2000. In addition, he was Associate Conductor of the Fort Worth Symphony Orchestra where he conducted outreach and educational concerts, state-wide tours, subscription concerts, and summer outdoor concerts as well as theatre performances.

A native of Berlin, Germany, Jens Georg Bachmann holds degrees in violin and conducting from the “Hanns Eisler” Musikhochschule in Berlin and the Juilliard School where he was the recipient of the Bruno Walter Memorial Scholarship. Mr. Bachmann has led performances at the Nürnberg State Opera (Werther and L’Elisir d’Amore), the Düsseldorf Opera (Die Zauberflöte and Swanlake), the Komische Oper Berlin where he made his professional opera debut at age 24 (La Vie Parisienne with a life national radio broadcast), and the Berlin State Opera (The Donkey’s Shadow). He has conducted numerous orchestras in Germany such as the state orchestras of Berlin, Munich, Nürnberg, Halle, and Hamburg, amongst others.

MISCHA SANTORA

For PSO’s second annual Edward T. Cone concert on January 20, 2008, the orchestra will be under the baton of a gifted young artist whose conducting career is blossoming in the U.S. and abroad. MISCHA SANTORA enters his seventh season as Music Director of the Cincinnati Chamber Orchestra and third season as Associate Conductor for the Minnesota Orchestra. He previously held the post of Music Director of the New York Youth Symphony from 1997-2002. Mischa’s devotion to contemporary music as well as his work with singers makes him an ideal choice for this concert which will present the world premiere of Edward Cone’s An Overture for the War, Cone’s Elegy, and Mahler’s stirring song cycle, Des Knaben Wunderhorn.

Santora's recent and future orchestral conducting appearances in North America include the Philadelphia Orchestra, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Minnesota Orchestra, the Louisville Orchestra, and the Houston, National, Kansas City, Hartford, Indianapolis, Eugene, and Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony Orchestras. In Europe, auspicious debuts include Zurich's Tonhalle Orchester, the Rotterdam Philharmonic, the Hungarian National Philharmonic Orchestra, the Budapest Matáv Orchestra, the Lucerne Symphony Orchestra, and the Orchestra of the Jeunesses Musicales Switzerland in a tour of their native country.

In addition to his extensive symphonic activities, Santora is active in the operatic world, having recently completed a multi-year tenure as Music Director of the International Opera Festival Miskolc (Hungary), which allowed him to conduct a wide range of operatic presentations over several summers. In the United States, as co-founder of Melopoeia Opera in Boston, Santora has mounted productions as diverse as Dido and Aeneas, Riders to the Sea, and La serva padrona in innovative, less traditional performance settings.

Santora has collaborated with many of the world's great solo artists, including Richard Stoltzman, Gary Graffman, Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg, Benita Valente, Vladimir Feltsman, John Aler, Pamela Frank, Elmar Oliveira, Ignat Soltzhenitsyn, David Jolley, Galina Gorchakova, Nikolai Putyilin, and Chantal Juillet, among many others. As a recipient of the 1998 Aspen Conducting Prize, Santora was invited to act as the Assistant Conductor for the Aspen Music Festival for three consecutive seasons (1999-2002). He has participated in master classes with Daniel Barenboim, Kurt Masur, David Zinman, Neeme Järvi, and Otto-Werner Mueller. Santora has been the recipient of many conducting honors from institutions such as the Presser Foundation, and the Kiefer-Hablitzel, and the Kurt-Dienemann Foundations of Switzerland.

Born to Hungarian parents in the Netherlands, Mischa Santora moved with his family to Switzerland. His upbringing in a musical family set him on a course of study leading to certificates in violin and teaching from the Academy for School and Church Music in Lucerne and the Hochschule der Künste in Berlin. He began violin studies with his father, a member of the Lucerne Symphony, and while in Berlin, studied with Thomas Brandis, former concertmaster of the Berlin Philharmonic. Santora subsequently undertook conducting studies with Otto-Werner Mueller at the Curtis Institute of Music, from which he graduated in 1997.

GUNTHER SCHULLER

For the March 16, 2008 concert, PSO is honored to announce that GUNTHER SCHULLER, one of the world’s most distinguished and celebrated living musicians, will lead the orchestra in this special concert presented in conjunction with the Princeton University Art Museum. Maestro Schuller will conduct his own composition, Seven Studies on Themes of Paul Klee, as well as works by Hindemith and Respighi.

Gunther Schuller, composer and conductor, is a man of many musical pursuits. He began his professional life as a horn player in both the jazz and classical worlds, working as readily with Miles Davis and Gil Evans as with Toscanini; he was principal horn of the Cincinnati Symphony from age sixteen and later of the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra until 1959. In the 1950s, he began a conducting career focusing largely on contemporary music, and thereafter conducted most of the major orchestras of the world in a wide range of works, including his own. He was central in precipitating a new stylistic marriage between progressive factions of jazz and classical, coining the term “Third Stream” and collaborating in the development of the style with John Lewis, the Modem Jazz Quartet, and others.

An educator of extraordinary influence, he has been on the faculties of the Manhattan School of Music and Yale University; he was, for many years, head of contemporary music activities (succeeding Aaron Copland) as well as a director of the Tanglewood Music Center, and served as President of the New England Conservatory. He has published several books and recently embarked on the writing of his memoirs.

Apropos to the March concert theme of music inspired by art, many of Schuller's orchestral compositions draw explicitly on visual influences while invoking the Impressionist and late Romantic tone poems of Debussy and Schoenberg. These include one of his most popular pieces, to be performed by the Princeton Symphony on the March concert, Seven Studies on Themes of Paul Klee (1959). Schuller describes this piece as a “translation” into musical terms of several paintings which were Klee's own translations of musical themes into the visual realm. Seven Studies was written for and premiered by the Minneapolis Orchestra. A later work, An Arc Ascending (1996), was inspired by photographs by Alice Weston. Orchestral works of similar origin are his Four Soundscapes (Hudson River Reminiscences) and Shapes and Designs.

The recipient of numerous awards and accolades, Schuller was presented with the Pulitzer Prize in 1994, two Guggenheim fellowships, the Darius Milhaud Award, the Rodgers & Hammerstein Award from Columbia University for lifetime achievement, a MacArthur Award, and numerous Lifetime Achievement awards including one to be awarded this year from the National Endowment on the Arts. He is an original member of the American Classical Music Hall of Fame. As a conductor, Mr. Schuller travels throughout the world, leading major ensembles from New Zealand to Holland to St. Louis. Mr. Schuller has written dozens of essays and four books, including renowned jazz history studies and a recent volume on the art of conducting, entitled The Compleat Conductor. Mr. Schuller also founded and led the New England Ragtime Ensemble, and is largely responsible for the renaissance of Scott Joplin and other ragtime greats.

ROSSEN MILANOV

ROSSEN MILANOV, guest conductor for PSO’s final concert on April 27, 2008, has already been hailed as “one who bears watching by anyone who cares about the future of music” (Chicago Tribune). He will lead the Princeton Symphony in performances of works by Prokofiev and Beethoven, and will collaborate with David Greilsammer in piano concertos by Mozart and Saint-Saëns. As Associate Conductor of The Philadelphia Orchestra, he leads subscription, family, educational, and holiday concerts. In March 2006, he was named Artistic Director of The Philadelphia Orchestra at The Mann Center for the Performing Arts. Mr. Milanov also serves as Music Director of both the Haddonfield Symphony in New Jersey and the New Symphony Orchestra in his native city of Sofia, Bulgaria. In 2003, he was named chief conductor of the Bulgarian National Radio Symphony Orchestra.

During the 2005-06 season, Mr. Milanov appeared with the Honolulu and Syracuse symphony orchestras, the Teatro Colón Buenos Aires, the National Orchestra of Mexico, and the National Orchestra of Colombia. He also made his debut at Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw with the Slovenia National Radio and Television Orchestra, and returned to the Curtis Institute to conduct a production of Mozart’s The Magic Flute. In the 2006-07 season, he conducted the Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra, the Residentie Orchestra of the Hague in the Netherlands, the Seoul Philharmonic, the Lucerne Symphony, the Auckland Philharmonic, the Virginia Symphony Orchestra, and the Honolulu Symphony, as well as a production of Dominick Argento’s Postcard from Morocco at Curtis Opera Theatre.

With The Philadelphia Orchestra, Mr. Milanov’s concert highlights have included critically acclaimed concerts on the Orchestra’s summer series at the Mann Center, recent performances of Adams’s Violin Concerto, and Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 15; a highly-praised production of Stravinsky’s The Soldier’s Tale; the world premiere of Nicholas Maw’s English Horn Concerto; and a week of concerts celebrating the 75th birthday of pianist Gary Graffman in a program featuring Ravel’s Left-Hand Piano Concerto, Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony, and Jennifer Higdon’s bluecathedral.

Mr. Milanov has led concerts and tours with the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, the Baltimore Symphony, the Colorado Symphony, the Cincinnati Chamber Orchestra, the Civic Orchestra of Chicago, the New World Symphony, the Indianapolis Symphony, the Omaha Symphony, the Duluth-Superior Symphony, the Juilliard Opera Center, and the Curtis Opera Theater. He was Music Director of the Chicago Youth Symphony from 1997 to 2001, and has participated in numerous summer festivals, including Tanglewood and the Interlochen Arts Festival. His recording of works by the Russian composer Alla Pavlova with the Moscow Philharmonic is available on the Naxos label.

Currently he is in the midst of leading a multi-year Mahler cycle with the Bulgarian National Radio Symphony Orchestra. Mr. Milanov has received the Award for Extraordinary Contribution to Bulgarian Culture, awarded by the Bulgarian Ministry of Culture. In 2005, he was chosen as Bulgaria’s Musician of the Year. Mr. Milanov studied conducting at the Juilliard School (recipient of the Bruno Walter Memorial Scholarship), the Curtis Institute of Music, Duquesne University, and the Bulgarian National Academy of Music.