Cover story
Chamber orchestra leader begins next movement: teaching
We talk to Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg, who is about to step down as music director of the New Century Chamber Orchestra.
Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg spent more than three decades living the life of the traveling violin soloist — playing concertos with the world’s greatest orchestras, touring and recording, and since 2008 serving as the artistic director of the New Century Chamber Orchestra.
And it was working for her — until it wasn’t.
“When you get to a certain age, you start to value your happiness a lot more than you used to,” she said during a recent interview. “The priority is no longer what you can achieve or how much money you can make. Instead, you start to ask, ‘Is this gratifying? Am I content?’
“And the answer, for a lot of what I was doing, was no.”
So a few seasons ago, SalernoSonnenberg, 56, began to disengage from the high-profile career that had first made her famous in the 1980s. She took a few victory laps, playing what she knew (even if she didn’t feel like making the fact public) would be her final performances of the warhorse concertos of Dvorák, Brahms and Tchaikovsky. She reshaped her schedule to take more assignments as an orchestra leader, guiding an ensemble while playing.
And in 2016, she made the bittersweet announcement that she would be stepping down from the NCCO, the conductorless string ensemble based in the Bay Area that has enjoyed a resurgence of artistic energy and power under Salerno-Sonnenberg’s leadership.
This week, as the orchestra marks the conclusion of its 25th season, it also celebrates a partnership that has yielded rewards for everyone concerned. The ensemble, always a sensitive collection of players, has adopted some of the electricity and unruly zest that constitute Salerno-Sonnenberg’s artistic fingerprint, producing performances that at their best have conjoined spontaneity and elegance.
The annual Featured Composer Program that Salerno-Sonnenberg instituted — in which each season threw a spotlight on a living composer, culminating in a new commission for the orchestra — has made a significant and much-needed addition to the repertoire for string orchestra. And even though the NCCO still doesn’t quite enjoy the stature that its excellence would warrant, the sheer star power that comes with having a
celebrity at the helm has raised the orchestra’s profile during the past nine years.
All those aspects of this collaboration will be celebrated during the week’s three concerts at the Herbst Theatre. The opening program, on Tuesday, May 16, is a nod to SalernoSonnenberg’s commissioning legacy, with works by Derek Bermel, Clarice Assad, Lera Auerbach and more. A “Farewell to Nadja” concert on Thursday, May 18, features Salerno-Sonnenberg as soloist in music of Vivaldi and Piazzolla, and the orchestra observes its silver jubilee on Saturday, May 20, with an all-Gershwin program featuring pianist Anne-Marie McDermott.
Once it’s over, a new chapter gets under way for everyone. The NCCO has appointed the British violinist Daniel Hope to serve a three-year stint with the title “artistic partner,” while the orchestra brings in a series of guest artists for consideration as the next artistic director. (The 2017-18 season, announced earlier this month, will include appearances by guest concertmasters Benjamin Beilman and Zachary De Pue.)
Salerno-Sonnenberg, meanwhile, is gearing up for an improbable relocation after nearly an entire lifetime as a New Yorker (she was born in Rome but immigrated at 8, and she flew into the Bay Area for NCCO concerts). Having come through what can only be described as a midlife crisis, she is getting ready to find solace not through any of the traditional remedies (sports car, younger paramour, dangerous hobby), but with a new city — New Orleans, which she now describes as “the great love of my life that I just didn’t know about.”
The idea of Salerno-Sonnenberg, who is single, living in the South takes a little getting used to. If nothing else, her distinctively high-energy demeanor, her physical restlessness and her mile-a-minute conversational style all seem like an uneasy fit for any place but New York.
Yet New Orleans, with its openness, its devotion to music, its stateliness and grace, has called to her, and in Septem-
ber she’s going to answer that call. Along with the allure of the city, an appointment at Loyola University has opened the world of teaching, and she’s carrying the legacy of the NCCO there with her.
“I’ve basically created a conductorless string orchestra with these kids, which is something we never had when I was in music school. I went to great schools — Curtis and Juilliard — and you’d think we would’ve had something like this. Because what you learn at that young age is beyond valuable,” she says.
“When I first went down there and started working with these kids, they were awful. But I thought, I’m going to get them to play better than they think they can play. And it felt like I was doing something important, something mattered — a lot more than playing one more concerto.”
The collaborative ethos of a conductorless orchestra is something Salerno-Sonnenberg has been ferrying around to more established ensembles as well. Over the past few years, she’s countered invitations for solo appearances with offers to lead performances from the concertmaster’s chair, as she does with the NCCO — and the response from colleagues, she says, is encouraging.
“We’re talking about hardened orchestra players, who have been in the section for 30 or 40 years. And when I come in for the first rehearsal, there’s some resentment because now they have to do a lot more work instead of sitting there playing the familiar part and relying on the conductor.
“But by the time we get to the dress rehearsal or the concert, it’s like they’re back in college again. I know these people — I’ve played concertos with them for decades — and the experience of making music in that concert is vibrant and engaged in a way I haven’t seen in them for a long time.”
Salerno-Sonnenberg knows something herself about that transformation. When she first joined the NCCO as a guest artist in 2007, her experience as a performer had been almost exclusively as a solo virtuoso, and the opportunity to succeed outgoing artistic director Krista Bennion Feeney came as a revelation.
“The life of a soloist is very isolating. You practice alone, you travel alone — I do anyway; some of them have posses — and you’re alone in the concerto really. But I’m
not an isolating person,” she says.
“And then to join New Century where we discuss how to play with everyone, and we help each other, we support each other, we hear the improvements together — well, it was a fabulous musical experience. It opened a door I didn’t know was there, and set me on the path to the life I am about to lead.”
Asked to identify some high points of her tenure with NCCO, Salerno-Sonnenberg immediately harks back to the group’s 2009 performances of Richard Strauss’ “Metamorphosen,” a rendition whose splendors were so manifest and unexpected that she tears up while describing it. She’s rightly proud of the collaborations she spearheaded with other local organizations, including Chanticleer, the San Francisco Girls Chorus and the San Francisco Opera Center. And she’s glad to have added a host of new works to the repertoire for string orchestra.
Regrets? She has a few, including some hoped-for recordings that never materialized and the contractual difficulties of getting the orchestra’s performances onto the Internet.
But the feeling of excitement as Salerno-Sonnenberg begins a new chapter in her life is palpable. Unprompted, she launches into a vivid decade-by-decade personal recap of her career to date.
“When I was in my 20s, I couldn’t wait to get to the concert hall, to get to the dressing room, to see my name on the dressing room, the whole scene. By the time I got to my 30s, I was tired, I was in no hurry to get to the hall — but then you hear the orchestra tuning up and they open that door backstage and you think: It’s showtime! You’re up!
“By the time I got to my 40s, I couldn’t wait till the concert was over. It was nothing to do with how I played — to this day, I would never phone it in — but I was looking forward to the afterward. I loved having played. Then I got to my 50s, and when the concert was over, I just wanted to go to sleep.
“And that’s all the sign you need that you have to change something.”
Change is on the way at last — a new home, a new phase in her career — and this week, some emotional goodbyes.
“This all feels very near at hand now. It’s like a family, and there are certain people that I do not want to say goodbye to,” she says.
“But I am so looking forward to coming back to San Francisco and going to a New Century concert. I want to see them and watch them and listen to them from the audience. It’s something I’ve never done.”