In Memoriam: Michael Morgan

Michael Morgan on the podium of the San Francisco Symphony (photograph by Kristen Loken, courtesy of the San Francisco Symphony)

Readers may recall the somewhat apologetic stance I took in writing about Michael Morgan conducting the San Francisco Symphony (SFS) almost exactly a month ago. The apology had to do with my decision to keep my workload manageable by confining myself to the San Francisco city limits. That meant that I had not yet experienced his conducting work with the Oakland East Bay Symphony. As a result, his visit to the SFS podium provided my first opportunity to experience his work. I came away with considerable satisfaction, reinforced when I learned that he would return to the SFS podium in February with a program that would feature Florence Price’s third symphony.

Sadly, that first opportunity turned out to be my last. Last night Joshua Kosman filed an obituary for Morgan, who died yesterday at the age of 63. This was one of those cases in which reading the San Francisco Chronicle online was far more advantageous than waiting for a print version to be left at my door.

It was clear from last month’s performance that Morgan prioritized the music itself over the music-makers. His chemistry with the SFS musicians could not have been better. This was most evident when he concluded the program with Nicholas Hersh’s arrangement of “The Charleston.” Since this is one of those iconic compositions in the history of jazz, Morgan knew how to allow and encourage free-wheeling improvisation from three of the SFS musicians, Mark Inouye on trumpet, Jerome Simas on clarinet, and Tim Higgins on trombone. As Duke Ellington once said, “It’s all music;” and Morgan’s scope of that “all” consistently found the right mix of balancing “the letter of the text” with the expressiveness of performance.

In the nineteenth century there were an artist named Otto Böhler that specialized in silhouettes. Back in my Examiner.com days, I would sometimes lead an article about Anton Bruckner with Böhler’s silhouette of Bruckner arriving in heaven, where he is greeted by Franz List, Richard Wagner, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Ludwig van Beethoven, and (seated at an organ) Johann Sebastian Bach. My wife later found a similar silhouette of Brahms’ heavenly entry. I suspect that Morgan has already been greeted by the Duke and James P. Johnson (who composed “The Charleston”). However, judging by the only Morgan performance I experienced, I am sure that Gioachino Rossini was also part of the welcoming party; and I wish I knew more about Morgan’s repertoire to add more names to that list.