Chicago Sinfonietta’s Mei-Ann Chen revels in her ‘great good fortune’

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Mei-Ann Chen, the new music director of the Chicago Sinfonietta, conducting a rehearsal at Wentz Concert Hall in Naperville. | Rich Hein~Sun-Times

Chicago
Sinfonietta

◆ 8 p.m. Saturday, Wentz Concert Hall, 71 E. Chicago Ave., Naperville

◆ 7:30 p.m. Monday, Symphony Center, 20 S. Michigan

◆ Wentz, $35-$45; SC, $26-$50

◆ chicagosinfonietta.org, (866)-811-4111

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Updated: November 10, 2011 5:14PM

It’s hard to squeeze in a brief talk with the Chicago Sinfonietta’s new music director Mei-Ann Chen.

It’s not because she’s so busy with a whirlwind schedule of rehearsals, planning sessions, studying scores, and meeting not only with musicians and composers but also cultural and community leaders throughout the city.

Rather it’s because she has so much to say — and all of it is interesting.

There’s the great-grandfather, a master noodle maker from the Fujian province in southeast China, who took his craft to Taiwan, where Chen was later born and spent her childhood.

There’s her decision at the age of 10 to become a conductor when there was no possibility for a young Taiwanese girl to study or find a role model in the field.

Or her last-minute audition at age 16, in a closed basement hotel bar in Taipei, that got her invited to a high school program affiliated with the New England Conservatory in Boston.

Or the times when she was so eager to make a bigger sound than she could on the violin and piano, her original instruments, that she blew into the metal on her music stand as if it were a trumpet mouthpiece.

When you experience what is almost a torrent of enthusiasm coming from Chen, who is also music director of the Memphis Symphony Orchestra, former music director of the Portland (Ore.) Youth Philharmonic and was an assistant conductor of the Atlanta, Baltimore and Oregon orchestras, you have a sense of why she knocked out the search committee when the Sinfonietta was looking for a successor to the only artistic chief it had ever had in its 24 years, founder Paul Freeman.

And then there’s the obvious question: How did she do it? She has had to break through many significant barriers. “After I received my doctorate from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, I received more rejection letters from orchestras than the number of notes I had ever actually conducted professionally,” she often recalls. And now she’s succeeding a legendary African-American conductor and music scholar to lead an institution with a strong focus on black and Latino musicians, composers and audience members.

“Of course these are real questions,” Chen, 38, said in a conversation Wednesday in the Sinfonietta’s downtown offices . “And they have many answers. One is that in the 21st century, multiculturalism, diversity and inclusion are increasingly global matters, and matters of gender as well as background.

“But another is that I can hardly begin to describe the great good fortune — maybe Beethoven would even say fate — that so much of my career has already been in working with African-American communities and musicians and organizations with strong interests in these communities. For my orchestra in Memphis, this is key. The history and contributions of African-Americans in Memphis and Chicago is enormous. And also in Atlanta — the city that so shaped Martin Luther King — Philadelphia and Baltimore. These opportunities are a large part of what attracted me to the Sinfonietta, along with the significant Hispanic communities here, and of course, the wonderful musicians in the orchestra. Paul Freeman, my generous predecessor and a mentor, has given us an unbelievable blueprint. And if you look at our first season of programming together, you will see that our plans in these areas are deep and ongoing ones.”

In fact, it’s rather astonishing how many areas come together in the group’s first concerts, kicking off Saturday at the Sinfonietta’s new home for its suburban performances, the state-of-the-art Wentz Concert Hall at North Central College in Naperville, and Monday at its longtime Chicago base, Orchestra Hall.

Chen notes with pride that the Sinfonietta will have “the tremendous honor of sharing the stage” with Ann Hobson Pilot, the first African-American woman to hold a prin­cipal position in a major American orchestra, who recently retired as principal harp from the Boston Symphony Orchestra and Boston Pops after 40 years. “And she will bring us the Chicago premieres of the concerto written for her to mark her retirement by none other than John Williams,” Chen said. “And she will be playing a 1956 work by William Grant Still as well, really the founder of the African-American classical composition tradition.

“I also look forward to sharing with audiences again a work by a Chinese composer resident in the U.S., An-Lun Huang, which was introduced to me by a non-Asian American and has become a kind of signature work for me, the ‘Saibei Dance.’ ”

And then, what else when we speak of fate? Beethoven knocking at the door with his Fifth Symphony, “the work that made me want to be a conductor when I was just a little girl, and that is loved by first-time concertgoers and lifetime veterans.”

New works and commissions from American composers, as well as classics, are important to Chen, as is working with other minority or unconventional artists. Her collaborators this season also include the Harlem String Quartet, Chicago composer-flutist Nicole Mitchell, and Adler Planetarium astronomer-video artist Jose Francisco Salgado, a native of Puerto Rico. Mexican Hector Guzman and African-Americans Harvey Felder and Jeri Lynne Johnson are guest conductors this season.

“I’m so excited,” Chen said. “And on Aug. 14, I was so touched to be conducting the Sinfonietta on the stage at Millennium Park at our free ‘Hello, Chicago’ concert before several thousand people.”

But she’s been so busy she hasn’t found a place to live of her own yet. “But I will! I can hardly wait to call Chicago home.”

Andrew Patner is critic at large for WFMT-FM (98.7).