“When the Berkeley Symphony called on Joseph Young to step in, the conductor had just two days to get up to speed on Leonard Bernstein’s second symphony, aptly named The Age of Anxiety, as well as the ominous majesty of the four orchestral interludes from Britten’s Peter Grimes,” writes Lisa Houston in Tuesday’s (11/29) San Francisco Classical Voice. “By all accounts he rose to the task admirably…. In the wake of this triumph, Young was offered the music directorship for a three-year post.… He is certainly a conductor on the rise, and feels this post to be a great fit. ‘What I like about Berkeley is that it’s so optimistic about music and open to new things…. [Berkeley is] an orchestra that has a history of doing daring and innovative things, and not only the orchestra, but there is a community that is so into it.… This town for me is the perfect place for a first music directorship. I’m in a wide-open, liberal thought-minded, curious place, and I just want to embrace that.” Young participated in the League of American Orchestras’ Bruno Walter National Conductors Preview and was a League of American Orchestras Conducting Fellow.
Posted October 31, 2019
