It’s heartbreaking to learn of the death on Friday of Michael Morgan, a much-loved conductor and generous colleague who devoted three decades to his work with the Oakland Symphony. “Our entire organization is grieving a profound loss,” Jim Hasler, the Symphony’s Board Chair said. “Michael’s impact on our community and the national orchestra field cannot be overstated – and he has left us too soon.
Writes Joshua Kosman in his touching tribute: “Michael was an excellent conductor, but more than that, he was a superb music director. His overall ambition was less to perform the symphonies of Beethoven or Schubert well — though naturally that was also part of the plan — than to find ways for the Oakland Symphony to be a force for good, in both the artistic and the civic arena. That’s why his programming was so restless and innovative, so devoted to championing the work of the underrepresented and the little-known.”
“In the manner of an older generation of conductors who came to an area and stayed put, Mr. Morgan spent the last 30 years of his life mostly in the Bay Area and its environs,” according to Tim Page in his Washington Post obituary.
Here’s a sample of Michael Morgan’s artistry — a clip of him conducting the Stony Brook Symphony Orchestra in John Corigliano’s 1977 Clarinet Concerto:
Filed under: conductors, music news
MEMETERIA by Thomas May 