The following fractional inventory of “homegrown” and “home-launched” music talent was prompted by the mention in Lisa Hirsch’s review of Festival d'Aix of the general director Ted Huffman’s youthful apprentice year in the Merola Opera Program.
The magic of “San Francisco origins” goes before and beyond the legions of talent from the Merola and Adler programs, SF Conservatory of Music, SF Symphony Youth Orchestra, and many other organizations, in a city that survived challenges and disasters.
SF Classical Voice reviews and features over the years have followed the emergence and career of such “homegrown talent” as Samuel Carl Adams, Teddy Abrams, Noah Bendix-Balgley, Gabriela Lena Frank, John Mangum, Conrad Tao, David Requiro, Gabriella Smith, Stephen Waarts, and many, many others.
To keep this manageable, I’ve limited the list to classical music, referring San Francisco’s famed history of jazz, rock, pop, and “world music” to future endeavors.
Historically, the story starts with the trio of immigrant children raised in San Francisco who became violin giants. They were born in The Roaring ‘20s, when the small pre-aviation-remote town already had a large orchestra playing for the Symphony and Opera:
- Yehudi Menuhin (1916–1999), born in New York of Russian-Jewish parents, moved here as a toddler;
- Ruggiero Ricci (1918–2012), born in San Bruno of Italian immigrant parents;
- Isaac Stern (1920–2001), born in Poland, but his family moved to San Francisco when he was 14 months old — six years before he took up piano, eight years before he had his first violin;
They were all child prodigies, all three trained with SF Symphony concertmaster Louis Persinger, made their debut in San Francisco before touring around the world as acclaimed young musicians, and later as superstars.
There was a fourth member of this distinguished group, a woman, at a time when male hegemony ruled over concert halls and orchestras: the violinist Miriam Solovieff, also San Francisco-born into an immigrant family, a fellow student and lifelong friend of Ricci, Stern, and Menuhin.
Another notable local musician of the era, from a family of Russian immigrants, was Reah Sadowsky, chronicled by the late Robert Commanday, founder of SF Classical Voice:
“Sadowsky was born in Winnipeg, Canada, to Russian immigrant parents who moved the family to San Francisco soon after she was born.
“Her mother was a trained pianist, her father, a violinist, and their daughter, immersed in music, gave her first performance at the [SF] Public Library at the age of six, two years later playing the first movement of Mozart’s Coronation Concerto, with the California Symphony.”During her long career, she gave recitals and performed as soloist to acclaim around the country and in Europe, eventually returning to the Bay Area, living in Berkeley, playing and teaching at the Berkeley Piano Club.
Following that generation came the pianist Leon Fleisher, born in San Francisco in 1928, of parents from Ukraine and Poland.
After Menuhin received the very first Pacific Musical Society top award, young Stern, Ricci, and Solovieff were all supported by the group.
In its centennial year, in 2010, the Society was lauded for its sponsorship of pianists Fleisher, Ruth Slenczynska, and Hilda Huang; cellist Matt Haimovitz, mezzo Evgenia Chaverdova, violinist Alex Zhou — and San Francisco teenager Pierre Salinger, who later gave up the piano and became John F. Kennedy’s press secretary.
Commanday wrote of the Society:
“In the good old days, during the first half of the last century, San Francisco’s musical and educational life was nurtured and enlivened by its music clubs, music stores, music schools, and even music magazines.
“The Pacific Musical Society is the sole survivor of that great tradition, still flourishing, still discovering, supporting, and enabling the best young and emerging talents.”
Luckily, the Society’s function and tradition are being maintained even during unprecedented fiscal and ideological challenges by many San Francisco Bay Area institutions that keep launching great careers.
They include Berkeley’s Crowden School and the UC Berkeley Department of Music; Marin’s San Domenico School, Dominican University, and College of Marin Music Department; Oakland’s Unified School District's music program, and many others.
