The Juneau Symphony is starting this season between two fall elections with a candidate screening of its own as the first of four contenders to replace recently departed Music Director Christopher Koch will conduct concerts this weekend featuring — (in)appropriately enough — a politically controversial icon both decorated and denounced by his country.
The symphony’s other three concerts for the season that spans until next June 1 will feature the other three finalists, with the board of directors scheduled to select a new music director in time for the 2025-26 season.
Dwayne Corbin, who is the symphony’s lead percussionist among many other credentials, will preside over the “Brilliant Defiance” concerts scheduled at 7:30 p.m. Saturday and 3 p.m. Sunday at the Juneau-Douglas High School: Yadaa.at Kalé auditorium. A pre-concert talk by Corbin about the pieces being performed is scheduled one hour before each show and he is scheduled to participate in meet-and-greets after the concerts as he seeks the music director’s job.
The concerts will feature Dmitri Shostakovich’s “Symphony No. 5” composed in 1937— which brought the Russian back into the good graces of Soviet leaders after prior work was deemed ideologically improper — plus works from Felix Mendelssohn’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” and Lili Boulanger’s “D’un matin de printemps” (French for “From a spring morning)”.
Corbin, in an interview Wednesday, said he was asked in early September to guest conduct the performances because Koch wasn’t going to be available during the scheduled weekend and the situation changed to an audition to replace him a couple of weeks later.
“I was thrilled to be guest conductor on this because I’ve actually conducted the symphony twice before in 2015 and 2018 when they had gaps between their music directors,” Corbin said. “And so I was really excited about that. And it’s one of the best pieces that I’ve ever known, which is the Shostakovich symphony, which is one of my favorites in all the world. And so I was really excited to be able to jump in and help out. And then the language changed a couple weeks later and I was asked if I wanted to be considered a candidate, not just a guest conductor, and I of course said ‘yes, absolutely.’”
Koch, named the music director of the symphony in November of 2021 after a search that started with 50 candidates, said in a phone interview from Metlakatla on Wednesday that he stepped down because of health issues involving himself and his family.
“I probably will not return to the life of conducting exactly, although I certainly hope that I can do it from time to time,” he said when asked about his future plans. “But in terms of like doing it all the time, like I’ve done for the last 20-something years, probably not. I do hope to stay involved in music in a variety of ways, but basically the future is an unknown a little bit at this point.”
Christopher Koch guides the Juneau Symphony through a concert rehearsal at Juneau-Douglas High School: Yadaa.at Kalé on May 30, 2023. He departed as music director of the symphony last month. (Mark Sabbatini / Juneau Empire file photo)
The other three finalists and the concerts they will conduct are:
• Wilbur Lin, music director of the Missouri Symphony as well as associate conductor of the Colorado Symphony. His family moved from New Jersey to Taiwan when he was six years old and he has extensive international conducting and directing experience. He is scheduled to conduct the Juneau Symphony’s winter mainstage concert titled “Virtuosity” on Jan. 25-26, featuring Joaquin Rodrigo’s “Concierto de Aranjuez”, Mozart’s “Overture to the Marriage of Figaro” and Beethoven’s “Symphony No. 7.”
• Brad Hogarth, associate professor of conducting at San Francisco State University, associate conductor of the Monterey Symphony, and music director and conductor of the Art Haus Collective that brings classical music to the Burning Man festival. He also performs trumpet with a number of orchestras. He is scheduled to conduct the Juneau Symphony’s “There and Back Again” concert on April 4 in Sitka and April 6 in Juneau, which will feature Antonin Dvoraks’s “Symphony No. 9,” Bach’s “Concerto for Oboe d’Amore” and German-American composer Ingrid Stolzel’s “City Beautiful.”
• Tigran Arakelyan, music director of the Northwest Mahler Festival and Port Townsend Symphony Orchestra in Washington state. In 2023 he was honored as one of the “Top 30 Professionals of the Year” by Musical America Worldwide and this year he was named as one of Yamaha Music USA’s “40 under 40 honorees.” He is scheduled to direct the Juneau Symphony’s spring “Homelands” concert on May 31 and June 1, featuring works ranging from Aaron Copland to Juneau singer-songwriter Annie Bartholomew to Louis Ballard’s “Four Moons” — the latter marking the first time the symphony has performed music by an Indigenous composer.
The finalists were selected from candidates who applied from the previous music director search since as a relatively recent list it still reflects the active and available talent pool for such a position, said Executive Director Charlotte Truitt. She said each candidate was assigned the program they will be conducting when they come to Juneau, and they will meet with board members as well as the symphony’s musicians.
“We will also be gathering from each of the candidates (their) vision for the ‘25-‘26 season, and part of that will be giving us a description of three classic concerts and one pops concert,” she said.
A candidate tries his hand at “Defiance”
Corbin, a resident of Newberg, Oregon, is a professor of instrumental music at George Fox University in that town, a conductor of Chehalem Symphony and the George Fox Wind Ensemble, has served as music director of the Tilikum Chamber Orchestra, and led concerts with Beaverton Symphony and the University of Portland Symphony.
He’s also got ties to the Juneau Symphony dating back to 2009 when he came roughly once a year to perform in concerts. In addition to conducting the symphony twice previously, he and his wife, Caryn, have alternated the principal percussion and principal timpani seats between them for the past two years.
In the “Brilliant Defiance” concerts Corbin is being asked to showcase a symphony by Shostakovich composed after he’d been formally denounced by Stalin — and thus denounced by the state press — and been told by the Soviet Union’s cultural chairman to “reject formalist errors and in his art attain something that could be understood by the broad masses.” The resulting “Symphony No. 5” for a time quelled the suspicion Shostakovich was a dissent — an appeasement Corbin said is fitting for the title of this weekend’s concerts.
“What I understand from that is really looking at the Shostakovich as a model of he gave the Soviet government what he needed to to be back in the good graces of them, and not either kicked out of the country or sent to Siberia — a good thing,” he said. “But he did it in a way that had a lot of subtext and subtlety, and was kind of defiant under the most obvious scheme of things.”
Dwayne Corbin conducts the Juneau Symphony during a rehearsal Tuesday for this weekend’s concerts at Juneau-Douglas High School: Yadaa.at Kalé. (Mark Sabbatini / Juneau Empire)
An element of “Brilliant Defiance” also exists in the composition by Boulanger, who suffered chronic illnesses from an early age until her death at the age of 24, Corbin said.
“She had a very productive time in her early 20s and late teens where she was battling her diseases — which we now know is actually Crohn’s disease — but they didn’t have that diagnosis then,” he said. “And this was a way she was processing and able to live when she couldn’t travel. And she had won a big composition award to go to Rome and that had to be delayed. She eventually did go. But there’s a sense of being personally defiant against the health challenge.”
Corbin said he plans to offer such context for the compositions being played at the concerts, as well as playing excerpts of them, during his pre-concert talks. He also plans to focus more in-depth on Shostakovich’s life beyond clashes with the Soviet government about his music.
“There’s also a whole other subtext of, in addition to the Soviet thing, he was processing some personal challenges,” Corbin said. “The name of his lover and some of these things are like embedded in the music in these sort of hidden ways. And there’s all these connections to the opera ‘Carmen’ that are buried within their own kind of play, some recordings that go back and forth between ‘Carmen’ the opera and Shostakovich because the last name of his lover was Carmen. And so like he’s doing this as a way to just give himself some composition material as well as the kind of process what he’s going through.”
Koch steps away from the stage
The program for this weekend’s concerts, as well as the others this season, were created by Koch before his departure in fulfilling one of the goals he had when he became the symphony’s music director.
“I was pushing for us to have our season figured out almost a year in advance, which is typical, and so that we’d already created a season,” he said. “I’m the one that did all the graphic design for them, so we’d already done all the design. We’d already done all the brochures and stuff.”
Koch started as director in the the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, but he said during the past three years he said the symphony has emerged strongly from a period of challenge and changes.
“I feel like we stabilized, largely, a community of musicians — both musicians that live in Juneau and musicians that come to Juneau to play — and we’re really growing that community in the sense that there’s sort of very much a group of regulars now and more people participating,” he said. “So the people that come into Juneau, it’s not like we have a whole different crew every time. These are all members of the orchestra who are wanting to be a part of our community.”
The symphony has also grown in size in recent years, Koch said.
“The kind of artistic creation that we’ve been capable of has been expanding and so that was rewarding to just keep growing in that way artistically,” he said.
A key element of that growth is the symphony’s concerts are expanding beyond the “conservative programming history” that existed for a long period, Koch said.
“Most of the music the symphony has played over its lifespan has been largely music that is 100 to 300 years old,” he said. “A lot of it, or almost all of it, is European men. And you know that we live in a much richer world now. And so one of the things that I was definitely pushing for is for what we do to really reflect the world we live in.”
“So that means focusing more on more recently composed music, or music by living composers, and especially composers who are not necessarily male or white European. It’s not that anyone was resistant to that. It’s not that. It’s just that that simply has been the role the symphony has played in the community. And it was time for some change and everyone was very supportive of that change.”
Featuring Boulanger’s composition at this weekend’s concerts and “Four Moons” by Native American composer Louis Ballard at the spring concert are examples of that expansion, Koch said.
What advice does Koch have for the four candidates conducting the programs he’s developed?
“One thing that I always told my students — as both conducting students and also when I would coach performers — is you have to be yourself,” he said. “If you’re not yourself, if you’re trying to channel something else, then A) you won’t be able to sustain it and B) the people around you won’t really get a sense of who you truly are.”
• Contact Mark Sabbatini at mark.sabbatini@juneauempire.com or (907) 957-2306.
