Conductor Kim Eun-sun Breaks the 'Wall of Exclusion' to Debut with the Berlin Philharmonic in April Next Year

Conductor Eun Sun Kim (43), music director of the San Francisco Opera (SFO) in the United States, will take the stage as a guest conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic in Germany next April.

Music Director Eunseon Kim of the San Francisco Opera ⓒTaehwan Kim [Photo by Seoul Philharmonic Orchestra]

On the 9th, the Berlin Philharmonic announced that Eun Sun Kim will make her debut at the Berlin Philharmonic Concert Hall from April 18 to 20 next year.

Founded in 1882, the Berlin Philharmonic is mentioned alongside the Vienna Philharmonic of Austria as one of the world's two major orchestras, but it is also known as a demanding and conservative ensemble as much as its history and tradition.

It only accepted female members in 1982, and in February of this year, for the first time in its 141-year history, it appointed Vineta Sareika as a female concertmaster. There has not yet been a female principal conductor, a position with even higher barriers than performance.

As the Berlin Philharmonic is a world-class top orchestra, simply stepping onto the podium as a guest conductor is regarded as recognition of a conductor's capabilities. The only Korean conductor to have guest conducted there is Myung-Whun Chung.

Eun Sun Kim studied composition and conducting at Yonsei University and its graduate school, then continued her studies at the Stuttgart University of Music in Germany. She gained international recognition by winning the 'Jes?s L?pez Cobos International Opera Conducting Competition' in Spain in May 2008. Subsequently, in 2010, she became the first female conductor to lead at the historic Royal Theatre of Madrid, founded during the reign of Queen Isabel II of Spain. In 2019, she was appointed as the first female music director of the SFO and has been leading the SFO since 2021.

The New York Times (NYT) described Eun Sun Kim as "making history" at the time of her appointment as SFO music director.

In 2020, Eun Sun Kim served as the general director of the French Revolution Day concert, the largest music event in France, conducting the Orchestre National de France, the Radio France Choir, and the boys' choir, gaining recognition on the world stage.

She also has a close connection with Kirill Petrenko, who leads the Berlin Philharmonic. They worked together when Petrenko was the music director of the Lyon Opera in France in 2011, with Kim serving as assistant conductor.

At next year's Berlin Philharmonic performance, Eun Sun Kim is scheduled to conduct Arnold Schoenberg's "Expectation," sung by soprano Tamara Wilson, and Sergei Rachmaninoff's Symphony No. 3.

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.