Introducing Pak Jung-Ho Pak Makes His Debut As Symphony’s New Associate Conductor
Jung-Ho Pak practically leaps off the television screen into Spokane. For the past five summers, Pak has conducted the Disney Young Persons Orchestra in the Hollywood Bowl in performances broadcast several times each year on the Disney Channel. On Sunday at The Met, Pak will make his official Spokane debut as the Spokane Symphony’s associate conductor.
The 34-year-old is also music director of the International Chamber Orchestra and the San Francisco-based Diablo Ballet, and he serves as associate conductor of the San Diego Symphony. His appointment as associate conductor of the Spokane Symphony was announced in July, the result of April auditions of seven finalists for the position.
Pak will conduct four concerts with the symphony this season in addition to working with the symphony’s education and audience development programs.
Pak, who was born in the San Francisco suburb of Burlingame, began studying the piano when he was 6. “Like most kids, I came to it on my own volition at first,” the conductor says, “then more reluctantly once the word ‘practice’ came into it.
“What kept me into music was the clarinet. Once you play a band or orchestral instrument, you get to play with other people and that was how I learned that music was a shared experience.”
Pak’s band experience in junior high led to his first attempts at conducting. “I first started conducting when I was about 13 or 14,” he says, “but it wasn’t until I was in college that I became aware that a conductor was something more than just a traffic cop on the podium.
“I knew I wanted to be a conductor from the time I was 18,” Pak says, “but I think it was for the wrong reasons. At that time I knew I had a physical aptitude for conducting, and I knew I could be a leader. What I had yet to realize was the fact that a conductor should ideally be the ‘composer’s advocate,’ to use Erich Leinsdorf’s phrase.”
Pak, who lives in the Los Angeles area, holds degrees from the University of California at Santa Cruz, the San Francisco Conservatory and the University of Southern California.
“Michael Senturia at the San Francisco Conservatory taught me that conducting is not about waving your arms in the air, but by looking at the score from a compositional standpoint. And Daniel Lewis, my teacher at USC, really gave me a sense of professionalism that conducting requires.”
Influential conductors who also have made an impact on Pak include such famous names as Herbert von Karajan, George Szell and Carlos Kleiber. “I was struck by the way Karajan created such a highly individual sound with the Berlin Philharmonic,” Pak says. “And early on I was fascinated with the virtuosity and discipline and incredible musicality of George Szell. Since then, I’ve been struck by the way Carlos Kleiber moves the musical energy along from the composer to the musicians to the audience.
“Recently I’ve come back to Leonard Bernstein and his ability to enjoy the moment and enjoy the people you are making music with.”
Pak worked with Bernstein and Seiji Ozawa at the Tanglewood Festival 1983.
After graduating from USC, Pak held a series of teaching and conducting positions that have taken him from Lehigh University to the University of California at Santa Barbara to UC-Berkeley, where he taught conducting and conducted the university orchestra from 1992 to 1995. He became principal conductor of the Disney Young Persons Orchestra in 1992.
“We take about 80 musicians from auditions around the country, all under the age of 13 (the youngest is 8),” Pak says. They are brought to Los Angeles for a little over a week to work on a classical orchestra repertoire, and then they give a concert at the Hollywood Bowl which is filmed and broadcast on the Disney Channel several times a year.
“What I’m proudest of is that it introduces young kids all over the country to an orchestra made up of their peers. My hope is that some child will see this and say, ‘I can play in an orchestra, too.’
“In line with this hope, I’m especially looking forward to working with Spokane music educators and doing workshops in the schools.”
Pak says the main reason he decided to accept the Spokane position along with his continuing responsibilities in Southern California was the people. “I’m not on a career track looking for ‘the next big gig.’ What I’m looking for is a job that will let me get better,” he says.
“The only way that can happen is working with musicians who care about the music and who care about each other. Jonathan Martin (the Spokane Symphony’s executive director) assured me that’s what this orchestra was like,” Pak adds. “So I came up in April and saw for myself.”
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