Eun Sun Kim Continues Wagner Initiative at SFO • October 2024
San Francisco, California
San Francisco Opera Music Director Eun Sun Kim continues the Wagnerian portion of her multi-year Verdi-Wagner initiative, intended to help shape the company’s nuanced artistic growth, with her first ever Tristan und Isolde. The nearly five-hour epic starred Simon O'Neill, Anja Kampe, Wolfgang Koch, Annika Schlicht, and Kwangchul Youn.
From The Artist: “Verdi and Wagner scores have such depth musically, and you can’t detach the relationship between the music and the drama. The musical language simply goes with the drama! In bel canto opera, you have such beautiful melodies, but not necessarily with real drama behind them.”
Photo by Cory Weaver / San Francisco Opera
Photo by Cory Weaver / San Francisco Opera
Critical Acclaim
“Magnificent conducting by Kim, leading Tristan for the first time. She commands every page of this daunting and harmonically unsettled score, from the hushed opening of the prelude through to Isolde’s concluding aria nearly five hours later. Drawing a sumptuous range of colors from the orchestra — the riotous glory of the second-act love duet and the darkly despairing Act 3 prelude were among the many highlights — she paced Saturday’s performance in great arcs, and the Opera Orchestra played with grandeur and total responsiveness under her.”
–San Francisco Chronicle
“In a spacious and purposeful account of the prelude, Kim and her orchestra had set the immersive musical terms of the production, SFO’s first performances of the work in 18 years. Kim captured the score’s narrative drive and voluptuous ravishments and the characters’ emotional storms. A deep, surging sea rose from the pit to both anchor and engulf the drama. From start to finish, Kim remained the masterly presiding presence, bringing forth the opera’s grand design and abundant subtleties in her first Tristan und Isolde outing.”
–Opera Magazine
“Kim conducted the monumental score with energetic control. She never lapsed into melodramatic moments, spinning out legato for its own sake. She handsomely highlighted the many instrumental contrasts, thereby strengthening the complexities of idea, mood, psychologically shifting intimacies. The marriage of the text and the music here is remarkable. Kim brought the sense of yearning that pervaded the whole performance.”
–OperaWire
"From the very first notes, what emerged from the orchestra pit for Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde was, appropriately, transcendent. Kim led with care, intelligence and incandescent clarity to bring out all the nuances of the score. It was her first go at conducting this massive work, but the results were revelatory. Phrases took shape, dynamics fell into place, and tempos quickened and subsided naturally to create the overwhelming sense of yearning that infuses the music. The music gained momentum slowly, surging and ebbing, foreshadowing the character of the whole 4-plus hours of the opera. Kim had the orchestra perfectly balanced to let the vocal lines shine. The glory of the opera, its music, was the vehicle that made the production come together in an unforgettable performance.”
–Seen and Heard International
“The orchestra sounded utterly clear and beautiful under Kim. She has the orchestra sounding transparent, every line is palpable. You can feel the music perfectly stacked up and almost see it, but it still feels very alive.”
–The Opera Tattler
"Kim’s work on SF Opera’s latest production seems like a celebration of her recent contract extension as music director. Watching her ebb and flow the orchestra along musical waves of Tristan and Isolde is truly watching someone in their element. This entire season has been primarily defined by the personal touch she’s brought to their productions, and this one is no different. This is fun for her. The real star of the show is the conductor in front of the stage, building every crescendo from smolder to eruption. Kim’s tenure has been defined by her innate ability to tap into the power of every note on the pages before her. She knows which how to layer the orchestra’s performance just right so that the score has texture rather than just noise. Putting another Wagner piece at her disposal is like inviting a child to Wonka’s factory, only she doesn’t gorge herself so much as enjoy each and every piece as if it were her last. When this is the result, one can’t really blame her, can they?"
–48 Hills
"Perhaps the most lauded element in the opera is the heroic orchestral music. Kim conducts the 72-piece orchestra through the musical marathon with great skill. The full orchestra resounds with rich tone and texture from the brass-driven fortissimos to the pianissimos like the beautiful English horn solo in Act 3. Tristan and Isolde stands as a magnum opus in the idiom, and this production reaches admirable artistic heights. "
–Berkshire Fine Arts
"Stupendous conducting and interpretation by Kim. The high point of the opera is Wagner’s achingly beautiful and intense music. Kim brought it to life with such precision that every passage spoke and the orchestra itself became a lead character, right along with the singers. Throughout the performance, Kim did not cover the singing with loud sound; the singers were always audible and she anticipated the emotional tenor of the arias, often quieting the orchestra to create space for emotions to build and then punctuating the dramatic tension with building sound."
–ArtHound
“Kim carefully stated the famed initial, questioning chord, insisted on the overture’s intricate phrasing, then steadily built to the opera’s strategically recurrent mordent that is Tristan and Isolde’s chain link of connection. Kim and the San Francisco Opera orchestra rose magnificently to the occasion with Kim’s usual vivid presence, the sound at one with the words that flowed clearly and easily from the stage. Orchestrally it was a measured, precise reading of Wagner’s meticulously nuanced score. We were totally immersed in Wagner’s complex, timeless, awesome gesamtkunstwerk soundscapes.”
–Opera Today
"Kim completed the triumvirate of pillars to bring this performance to such an exhilarating level. Tension is the name of the game for any performance of Tristan und Isolde. She was admirable in building the structure of the opera and maintaining it throughout. She meticulously paced each scene and beautifully shaped the peaks, coaxing a glorious sound from the SF Opera Orchestra. More importantly, she completely supported the singers on stage, ensuring each and every one was fully heard, even during the loudest parts, recalling her approach to getting the best of the singers on her stage in the recently released documentary Eun Sun Kim: A Journey to Lohengrin."
–Parterre Box
“Tristan und Isolde was a musical triumph, and the star of the night was Eun Sun Kim. She is rapidly becoming a major Wagner conductor. Upon hearing her conduct Parsifal in January 2024 at Houston Grand Opera, it was hard to grasp that it was Kim’s first time conducting this opera. Here, working with her own superb orchestra in another demanding Wagner juggernaut, once again for the first time, she has surpassed that performance. With mediocre conducting, Tristan can be a long sit. Here, the listener’s attention never flags, and every passage is carefully wrought, laden with meaning. Kim uses the full range of tempos and dynamics. Often, before critical moments like the Act 2 love duet, her tempo slows portentously and her orchestra whispers, becoming almost inaudible. In that act, she somehow heightens the otherworldly sense of the lovers’ relationship, then returns to earth viscerally as things crash apart at the act’s end. The prelude to Act 3, some of the saddest music ever written, becomes even more poignant here via perfectly modulated string vibrato. Throughout the opera, Kim manages to maximize dramatic tension and flair without sacrificing precision.”
–Classical Voice North America
"The finest Tristan I’ve ever encountered at the War Memorial Opera House, conducted by Kim with a fascinating blend of tenderness and urgency. It’s a production that makes time stand still, but in a good way; Kim, the cast, and the orchestra pull it off with elegance and grace. The really interesting part was Kim’s conducting, with a gift for nuance. Kim works with a gentler, more shaded expressive palette, allowing emotion to surface from within rather than imposing it from without. The results can sneak up on you and tear your heart out."
–On the Pacific Aisle
"At the heart of it all is the music of Wagner… Kudos, then, to the orchestra. And can we take a moment to appreciate the gift San Francisco has in Eun Sun Kim at the podium? All the dynamism of the score comes alive under her baton, making it welcome news that she’s just signed a five-year extension. (Fittingly, she’s also committed to doing a Wagner opera each season, including an upcoming Ring cycle.)"
–KQED
“An extraordinary thing is underway at San Francisco Opera: by taking on one of the major works of the wizard of Bayreuth each season, Kim has set about establishing herself as a formidable young Wagnerian. Tristan und Isolde is generating a wave of euphoria – just one month after the season’s auspicious start with an impressive Ballo in maschera. This return of Wagner’s inexhaustible opera will undoubtedly be recalled as a high-water mark. A good deal of the credit goes to Kim and the SFO musicians for their success in establishing the transportive sound world Wagner demands – along with his drastic transitions in atmosphere for each of the opera’s three acts – with unflagging intensity, focus and intentionality. This is Kim’s first outing with Tristan, yet her devotion to the score yielded a ravishing transparency of detail and colour, always in sync with the deepest layers of Wagner’s soul drama. She showed a preternatural grasp of Wagner’s structuring of time that made sense of the shift from nervous anticipation to a zone beyond counting in the second act and that was at its most compelling in the dark night through which Tristan ventures in the third. A deep respect for the sheer beauty or alienness of Wagner’s sonic pictures emerged. Kim shaped stretches of the love duet as quasi-Italianate cantilena, while the gradually thinning string textures in the prelude to the third act have rarely sounded so desolate. Timbral and spatial details registered with maximal impact. SFO even supplied a bona fide wooden trumpet to execute the shepherd’s joyful signalling. With musical and dramatic values so firmly in place, Wagner’s ‘deeds of music’ became strikingly visible.”
–Opera Now