“If you want to conduct, you will have to start your own orchestra.”
Pierre Monteux to Edgar Braun
Founder and Music Director Emeritus, Edgar Braun
In 1952 a nineteen-year old UC Berkeley violinist, Edgar Braun, spent the summer studying with conductor Pierre Monteux at his famous music school in Maine. When Monteux offered to recommend him to be the Assistant Conductor of the Minneapolis Symphony, Braun hesitated. Monteux then said, "If you want to conduct, you will have to start your own orchestra.” Braun came home and in 1953 with his friend Adrian Sunshine, founded the San Francisco Chamber Orchestra.
The orchestra’s first concert was in April of that year at Berkeley’s Hillel Foundation. In those days, the San Francisco Symphony was very much a part-time gig, and many SFS musicians were glad to take part in these early SFCO concerts. Maestro Braun took sole directorship of the ensemble when Sunshine departed for Europe in 1958 and led the orchestra through thick-and-thin until Benjamin Simon was appointed Music Director in 2002. During Braun’s more than forty years leading the SFCO, he conducted over 600 concerts in venues throughout California, founded the Lake Tahoe Summer Music Festival, started the “Twilight Series” at the M.H. de Young Museum, and presented several generations of Bay Area musicians as soloists and ensemble players including Simon who was hired for his first professional solo engagement by Braun in 1975.
Braun, a violin and conducting student at the University of California at Berkeley, had also majored in business administration upon the urging of his parents to “have a career to fall back on.” He graduated Hastings Law School and entered a career practicing tax law, but music remained Braun’s true love. By his death in 2002, he had conducted orchestras in 16 countries while running a successful law practice, raising a family in Berkeley, and leading the San Francisco Chamber Orchestra.
Music Director Emeritus, Benjamin Simon
In January 2002, Benjamin Simon became the SFCO’s second Music Director. A violist by training and a chamber musician at heart, Maestro Simon is a San Francisco native whose career as a chamber and orchestra musician has led him through New York City, Buffalo, and Los Angeles. A playful innovator, Simon has ensured the orchestra’s relevance in a constantly changing environment while staying true to Braun’s vision of providing first-class, live music performances that are accessible to the community at large. The SFCO is now recognized as one of the premier chamber orchestras in the Bay Area, serving thousands of audience members of all ages and backgrounds every year with four MainStage Concerts—each performed in San Francisco, Berkeley, and Palo Alto—three Family Concerts—each performed in San Francisco, Oakland, and San Mateo—and two Very First Concerts for our youngest listeners, a collaboration with Berkeley’s Crowden Music Center.
