San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Longtime Oakland Symphony leader
Michael Morgan, the gregarious and energetic conductor who helped turn the Oakland Symphony into a model for community involvement with the arts while maintaining a high level of artistic excellence, has died at age 63.
His death Friday was confirmed by symphony publicist Marshall Lamm. Morgan underwent a successful kidney transplant in May but last week developed a severe infection and was admitted to the intensive care unit of Kaiser Permanente in Oakland.
“This is a terribly sad moment for everyone in the Oakland Symphony family,” Executive Director Mieko Hatano said in a statement. “We have lost our guiding father.”
During a 30-year career in Oakland, Morgan consistently conceived of his role as a dual one. As music director, he helped shape the orchestra into a top-flight community ensemble, enriched its repertoire with a plentiful helping of commissioned works and crossover projects, and led concerts at the Paramount Theatre that at their best displayed a deep command of the orchestral tradition.
At the same time, Morgan was tireless in ensuring that the orchestra played a key role in music education, in community outreach and in serving as a focal point for the distinct ethnic and socioeconomic strata of East Bay civic life.
“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,” Morgan said in a 2013 interview with The Chronicle.
The orchestra’s efforts in that regard include an active program of visits to Oakland’s public schools — in which Morgan was always a popular presence — as well as a series of concerts devoted to geographic areas such as Armenia, Iran and the Middle East, with particular outreach to the corresponding ethnic communities in the Bay Area.
In 2020, Morgan helped adapt that format to create “Currents,” a collection of online programming by the San Francisco Symphony that turned a spotlight on the intersections between classical music and other traditions, including jazz, salsa and Chinese music.
Morgan’s commitment to expanding the orchestral repertoire extended beyond the East Bay. In July, during what would be his final public appearance, he guestconducted the San Francisco Symphony in a program that included the Third Symphony of the 19th century French composer Louise Farrenc and “Charleston,” James P. Johnson’s classic of 1920s jazz. Morgan was scheduled to return to Davies Symphony Hall in February to give the first San Francisco performance of Florence Price’s Third Symphony. In recent seasons, he had led the Oakland Symphony in powerhouse renditions of both the Farrenc and Price works.
“Our entire organization is grieving a profound loss,” Oakland Symphony board Chairman Jim Hasler said in a statement. “Michael’s impact on our community and the national orchestra field cannot be overstated — and he has left us too soon.” Morgan was notable beyond the Bay Area as one of the classical world’s few African American conductors of any stature — but he treated that distinction warily, and with a characteristic degree of frankness. As a rule, for example, he was reluctant to accept guest-conducting assignments pegged to the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday or Black History Month, unless it involved an orchestra with which he already had a working relationship.
“It’s impossible to maintain the respect of an orchestra,” he said, “if they think that the only reason you’re there is that they needed a Black conductor.”
Still, he used his presence in Oakland, and especially in his frequent interactions with the city’s schoolchildren, to establish himself as a role model for Black youths with an interest in the arts.
Morgan was just that sort of city kid himself. Born in
“I feel very fortunate to have landed somewhere I really like.”
Washington, D.C., in 1957, he was educated in the city’s public schools and began conducting at age 12. Later, in his studies at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music in Ohio and at Tanglewood, he came under the wing of conductors Gunther Schuller, Seiji Ozawa and especially Leonard Bernstein, who proved an important mentor.
After making his operatic debut in 1982 at the Vienna State Opera, Morgan was hired by Sir Georg Solti as assistant conductor at the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, where he served for five years under Solti and his successor, Daniel Barenboim.
He was hired in Oakland in 1991.
Michael Morgan, longtime Oakland Symphony music director
In addition to his position with the Oakland Symphony, which also involved leading the Oakland Youth Orchestra and Oakland Symphony Chorus, Morgan was the music director of the Bear Valley Music Festival in Alpine County and of Gateways Music Festival in Rochester, N.Y. He was music director emeritus of the Sacramento Philharmonic and Opera and was on the boards of Oaktown Jazz Workshops and the Purple Silk Music Education Foundation.
He was also a former music director of Festival Opera in Walnut Creek, where in addition to conducting he occasionally worked as a stage director as well, mounting inventive productions of Mozart’s “Don Giovanni” and Britten’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”
In an era when most conductors assemble a career through endless and overambitious rounds of touring and guest-conducting, Morgan was a rare figure who seemed perfectly content with the artistic and financial rewards available in his own backyard.
“I feel very fortunate to have landed somewhere I really like,” he once told The Chronicle. “There is basically no conductor I know of with a career that I find enviable.”
Morgan is survived by his mother, Mabel, and his sister, Jacquelyn, both of Oakland. Information on a memorial service is pending.