San Francisco Opera's Music Director
December 05, 2019
San Francisco Opera's next music director is Eun Sun Kim (pictured, photograph by Nikolaj Lund). The company has been without a head conductor since Nicola Luisotti left in 2017.
Kim conducted a memorable Rusalka last June and is conducting the Adler concert tomorrow.
She is one of the only female music directors of a major opera company in the United States, other than Lidiya Yankovskaya, who has been Chicago Opera Theater's music director since 2017.
It is really nice to see SF Opera put a woman of color into a leadership position, after creating a Department of Diversity, Equity and Community last summer and the various attempts at "diverse" operas such as Girls of the Golden West and Dream of the Red Chamber. Kim is from Seoul and studied composition and conducting there as well as in Stuttgart.