Concert Date Is a Family Affair for Chung Trio

The first image that leaps to mind at the mention of a family music ensemble is a gaggle of youngsters wearing Swiss mountain costumes. Fortunately, the Chung Trio is an ensemble of significantly more sophisticated siblings. Under the auspices of the La Jolla Chamber Music Society, this piano trio of violinist Kyung-wha Chung, cellist Myung-wha Chung, and pianist Myung-whun Chung will make its local debut Saturday night at Sherwood Auditorium.

A prodigy at the keyboard, Myung-whun Chung was able at age 7 to perform a Haydn piano concerto with the Seoul Philharmonic. With his two older sisters he formed their family trio, which made its professional debut in 1962. Because each member has chosen to follow an individual performing career, the ensemble now tours only rarely.

Following the lead of a number of more well-known colleagues, Chung has moved his career from the piano bench to the conductor’s podium. Last week, as he was preparing for the trio’s La Jolla performance, he was conducting “Madama Butterfly” at the Metropolitan Opera.

“I started as (Carlo Mario) Guilini’s assistant when he was music director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic,” Chung said. “Then I was appointed associate conductor in 1980, which I did for three years.” Although he did some opera conducting with San Francisco Opera, he has found his niche in Italy. Chung and family, his wife and three sons, have settled in Rome, which allows him to commute to Florence, where he is resident conductor with the opera there. But he has not cut all ties with his earlier career.

“My sisters and I have decided to perform together a couple of weeks every year and to make at least one recording. Since we are preparing two Shostakovich trios for Decca, we have put them on the La Jolla program.”

In addition to the Shostakovich trios, the ensemble will play Schubert’s Trio in B-flat Major, Op. 99.

Conductor Denis de Coteau will do 38 performances of Tchaikovsky’s “Nutcracker” with the San Francisco Ballet this season, but he claims he is not fazed by such repetition.

“First of all, since I am doing exactly what I want to do, I have never thought of all those ‘Nutcrackers’ as fatiguing,” said de Coteau, who has been the music director of that Bay Area dance company for 15 years. Seven local performances by San Francisco Ballet in San Diego Civic Theatre, starting Nov. 23, kick off the company’s “Nutcracker” binge for this season. Although de Coteau has his own orchestra at San Francisco Ballet, when the corps comes to town, they use the San Diego Symphony in the pit.

“Especially for the players in the pit, by the eighth or ninth performance, the temptation is to relax, so we have to fight to keep the same quality we had on opening night. I always remember the advice one of my teachers gave his conducting students in Salzburg. ‘No matter how many times you have conducted a score, there are at least 100 people in the audience who are hearing it for the first time, and they deserve the same dedication you gave your first performance.’ ”

For those fans of musical trivia, the music director de Coteau replaced when he took his position with San Francisco Ballet was Earl Bernard Murray, who was the San Diego Symphony’s music director from 1959-66.

More traditional than San Francisco Ballet’s visit is the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra’s gift-wrapped performance of Bach’s Six Brandenburg Concertos during the weeks before Christmas. This year, to everyone’s surprise, the Los Angeles orchestra decided to celebrate its 10th annual visit with the Brandenburg Concertos by dropping three of the concertos and substituting Corelli’s “Christmas” Concerto Grosso and Bach’s Third Suite for Orchestra. Guest soloist Stephen Burns, who appeared last season with the San Diego Symphony, will handle the demanding trumpet solo in the Second Brandenburg Concerto.

The La Jolla Chamber Music Society, which has always sponsored the event, found itself looking for a new hall after the congregation of the Immaculata, the blue-domed Roman Catholic church on the University of San Diego campus, decided Bach was no longer welcome in those hallowed halls. According to a spokesman for the chamber music society, some members of the parish objected to secular instrumental music being performed in their church, although the Brandenburg Concertos had been performed there for several consecutive years.

The society was welcomed with open arms, however, at the First United Methodist Church in Mission Valley, where the concert will take place on Dec. 11, at 7 p.m. If the stark modernism of the Methodist edifice lacks some of the Old World flavor of the Immaculata, at least the Methodist church offers more seating and fewer obstructed views of the orchestra.