“Not every organization is as deeply enmeshed with its community as the Oakland East Bay Symphony. For longtime Music Director Michael Morgan, that relationship goes to the heart of what makes the organization unique,” writes Joshua Kosman in Sunday’s (11/3) San Francisco Chronicle. “ ‘To me, the notion of community building—of pulling various groups of people together—is at least as important as the music an orchestra plays,’ he said during a recent interview in his Oakland home. For the OEBS, which marks its 25th anniversary on Friday night … that means … maintaining an active presence in the city’s public schools … [and] devoting more than a third of its annual operating budget of $2.2 million to education and outreach.” Morgan became music director in 1988, and “his portfolio has gotten even broader since 2010, when an organizational merger brought the Oakland Youth Orchestra and Oakland Symphony Chorus under the same roof.… Morgan also leads the Sacramento Philharmonic Orchestra and the Sacramento Opera…. For the most part he doesn’t have any ambitions to be elsewhere. ‘I feel very fortunate to have landed somewhere I really like,’ he says. ‘There is basically no conductor I know of with a career that I find enviable.’ ”
Posted November 1, 2013
