Milwaukee Symphony names Ken-David Masur its new music director
In naming Ken-David Masur its next music director, the Milwaukee Symphony has selected a conductor with worldwide experience, steeped in Germanic tradition, recognized for his collaborative approach and in love with choral music.
But wait, there’s more: Masur appreciates the challenge and opportunity waiting for a music director leading a symphony orchestra through the opening of a new concert hall. As a boy, he watched his father, the famed conductor Kurt Masur, open the new Gewandhaus concert hall in Leipzig.
The Milwaukee Symphony announced Masur’s appointment Monday. As music director designate, Masur will plan next season’s music in conjunction with Bret Dorhout, the symphony’s vice president of artistic planning and operations. Masur will begin full time duties as music director with the 2019-’20 season, when he will conduct eight weeks of programs. In the 2020-’21 season, he will conduct 13 weeks of programs.
The symphony plans to open its new concert home, the former Warner Grand Theatre, in September 2020.
Masur’s contract runs through the 2022-’23 season.
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“I’m overwhelmed with both excitement and gratitude for the time I’ve already been able to have with the orchestra, and for the extreme warmth that I’ve felt every time that I’ve visited,” Masur said during a recent phone conversation.
“I can’t wait to explore this partnership and this relationship and get to know the orchestra and the members more and more, each one of them,” he said.
Masur, 41, was a unanimous choice of the symphony’s search committee of board members, donors, staff and orchestra musicians, said committee chairman Doug Hagerman in a statement released by the MSO. “Ken-David is a once-in-a-generation musician, conductor and innovator who boasts an impressive resume of accomplishments, yet is friendly and approachable.”
The new music director succeeds Edo de Waart, who stepped down at the end of the 2016-’17 season.
Masur is associate conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra and principal guest conductor of the Munich Symphony. As a guest conductor, Masur led Milwaukee Symphony programs in May and September of this year. Masur, whose mother is Japanese soprano Tomoko Sakurai, has conducted in Japan, Korea and Hong Kong as well as in Russia and France.
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During a September interview, when Masur visited Milwaukee for his second guest-conducting stint, he praised its members for their kindness and responsiveness to him.
He and his wife, pianist Melinda Lee Masur, are founders and artistic directors of New York’s Chelsea Music Festival, a themed annual event that connects music, visual art and food. The Masurs, who live in Boston, have children ages 10, 8 and 6.
“Moving with a family of five will take some time,” Masur said, but they “plan to be embedded in the Milwaukee community absolutely.”
Masur was born in Leipzig, then part of East Germany, where his father Kurt, as leader of the orchestra, led the effort to build a new concert hall, which opened when Ken-David was 4. At different points in his youth, Ken-David Masur played violin, trumpet and sang. He did not immediately aspire to conduct, seeing how complex his father’s job was. “I knew how much he put into not just conducting on the podium but … leading and hosting and administrative and connecting with people … ”
In 1991, Kurt Masur was named music director of the New York Philharmonic. The family moved to New York, plunging the teenage Ken-David into a cosmopolitan musical culture. His father’s musical friends included jazz trumpeter Wynton Marsalis, and Ken-David's recreational listening today often includes jazz pianists such as Erroll Garner and Oscar Peterson.
After graduating from Columbia University in 2002, Masur studied voice with bass-baritone Thomas Quasthoff in Germany and began working in the choral world, sometimes helping his father prepare choirs for concerts, which was both professionally and personally fulfilling. Kurt Masur died in 2015 from complications of Parkinson’s disease.
Choral music remains important to the new music director. “I cannot wait to be working with our magnificent symphony chorus and (director) Cheryl Frazes Hill. Having grown up in a choir environment, a healthy vocal culture is so very important to me,” Masur wrote in a followup email.
His Milwaukee Symphony dreams include commissions for new music and a deep connection with musical education in the area.
Asked about drawing a younger audience to classical music, Masur responded thoughtfully. “First of all, young people can tell whether or not you’re fully behind something,” he said.
“I personally have to believe, and I do, that music always has something to say about current life events … to give a feeling of community and love … ”
While Masur believes it’s important to hear great symphonic works in an “acoustically ideal environment,” it’s also important to get out to where people are, particularly people who might be shy about coming to a concert hall. In other words, we not only invite them to our house, we also go to their house, Masur said.
Programming the Chelsea festival with his wife Melinda for a New York audience that has many alternatives has helped Masur see what people are looking for: “something eye-opening without sensationalism.” Which is exactly, Masur said with a laugh, how critic Eduard Hanslick described the music of Brahms.
The Milwaukee Symphony said it hopes to bring Masur back again to conduct performances during the current season.