Talmi Is Named Music Director of S.D. Symphony

After a two-year search for a new music director, the San Diego Symphony returned to Square 1 on Tuesday.

Israeli conductor Yoav Talmi, whose name has led every speculative list of likely new music directors from the start, will be the symphony’s new music director, starting Oct. 1, 1990, the symphony announced.

Reached by telephone at a dinner party with friends near Tel Aviv, Talmi said: “I am very much looking forward to coming to San Diego.

“The orchestra has great potential. It has many, many wonderful, good musicians. The standard there is very high. The orchestra has a good tradition of working with good conductors. It needs now stability. It’s a wonderful ensemble.”

The 46-year-old Talmi has just completed his term as music director of the New Israeli Opera in Tel Aviv, where he will return next year as guest conductor. Much of his conducting reputation was made during his four years (1984-88) as music director of the Israel Chamber Orchestra, which recorded and toured extensively under his leadership.

“It’s very important to for the musicians,” the symphony’s executive director, Wesley Brustad, said at a Tuesday news conference at Symphony Hall. “It’s a signal to the community that our artistic leadership is intact.”

The 81-member orchestra has been without an artistic leader since David Atherton resigned his music director’s post in February, 1987, amid a bitter labor dispute between musicians and management.

After the canceled 1986-87 season, musicians and management signed a two-year pact that returned the orchestra to Symphony Hall in the fall of 1987. The current contract expires Sept. 30, but that Talmi will not be engaged in contract talks scheduled for the summer, Brustad said.

Talmi has definite plans for the San Diego Symphony, including ways to increase the audience size, but he refused to divulge them until he has shared them with Brustad next week.

Talmi made his debut with the San Diego Symphony in December, 1987, and has conducted the local orchestra more frequently than any other guest conductor over the past two years. He will be back on the local podium May 5 and 6, and will also open next fall’s subscription concert season with a program of Mozart and Mahler.

By his own admission, Talmi’s musical predilections include French music, notably the works of Maurice Ravel, and the traditional German symphonic school.

He will serve as music director-designate for the rest of the current season and for the upcoming 1989-90 season.

Talmi will be in San Diego about five weeks during the 1989-90 season as music director designate. Besides opening the season, he will conduct two other subscription concerts. Talmi will also spend two weeks holding auditions and planning upcoming seasons, he said. During each year of his three-year contract, Talmi will be in San Diego 3 to 3 1/2 months.

Talmi was born in 1943, in Israel. He began studying piano at age 5 with his father, a high school music teacher.

“I was always composing,” Talmi said Tuesday. “I didn’t know how to write notes, so my father would write them.”

Talmi performed his first piano concerto with an orchestra, the Youth Philharmonic Orchestra in Israel, at the age of 10. By 13, he was performing solo regularly, when he realized he had a desire to conduct.

“At 15, I knew that I would turn to conducting,” Talmi said. “I could not sit still when I heard music. I was conducting with my hands and body.”

He attended the Rubin Academy of Music in Tel Aviv and the Juilliard School in New York, studying composition and conducting. He received the Koussevitsky Conducting Prize at Tanglewood in 1969.

As the music director of an American orchestra, Talmi promised to give American composers a fair hearing. He noted in an interview last fall that, as artistic director and conductor of the Gelders Orchestra in Arnhem, the Netherlands (1974-80), he frequently programmed works by Dutch composers, especially new compositions commissioned by the orchestra.

Although he acknowledged that there had been many difficult days “and even years” in his career, Talmi said he had never doubted his choice of conducting.

“It is one of the most difficult professions you can imagine,” he said. “You are always starting and starting and starting. Yet it is the most rewarding profession also.”

Besides his extensive guest conducting, Talmi’s resume includes a number of recordings. His recording of Bruckner’s Ninth Symphony with the Oslo Philharmonic on London’s Chandos label recently won him the Grand Prix du Disque award, and a recording of Tchaikovsky and Schonberg with the Israel Chamber Orchestra was also highly acclaimed.

Talmi and his wife, Erella, a flutist, will celebrate their 25th wedding anniversary in September. They have two children, a son in the Israeli Army and a 16-year-old daughter.

Staff Writer Hilliard Harper also contributed to this story.