When Eun Sun Kim conducts an opera performance, all the attention is on her. In the pit, 100 orchestral musicians look to her for guidance, and the singers on the stage do the same. Thousands of audience members hang on the results of the process.
Yet Kim, who has finally assumed her place as music director of the San Francisco Opera, insists she became a conductor as a way of avoiding the stage fright she felt as a young pianist.
“I used to be a very shy girl, very introverted,” Kim told The Chronicle during a visit near the War Memorial Opera House, where she was in rehearsals for the new production of Beethoven’s “Fidelio,” opening Thursday, Oct. 14. “And now … I’m not! When you’re a conductor, or the leader of a company, and you have to lead 300 people, you have to command. You cannot be shy.”
Kim’s brand of command, though, is a far cry from the imperious top-down style some conductors favor. According to all available testimony, she brings all her fellow artists into the process on an even footing.
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“She’s an incredibly collaborative partner — and I’ll be honest, that’s not always what conductors are known for,” said mezzo-soprano Jamie Barton, who appeared in the 2019 production of Dvorák’s “Rusalka” that marked Kim’s company debut.
“And she’s so knowledgeable about what she’s doing, in every aspect. Right from the first day of ‘Rusalka’ rehearsals, she was lip-syncing the Czech!”
If collaboration and detailed preparation are the twin guidelines of Kim’s strategy, that’s at least partially an outcome of a decade spent as a guest conductor of both opera companies and symphony orchestras.
“When you guest-conduct, you go to a new place, you see more or less 200 people you don’t know, and you have to lead them all on the first day. So through that experience, I think I know what I’m doing — not in an arrogant way, but because that’s the job I’ve been doing all this time,” she said.
The music directorship promises to add a layer of administrative duties on top of Kim’s conducting plans. But that doesn’t seem to faze her in the slightest.
“I’m the kind of person who likes challenges,” she said, with one of the eruptive peals of laughter that frequently punctuate her conversation. “If there’s homework to be done, I dig into it.
“When I talked with (General Director) Matthew Shilvock about the music directorship for the first time, I told him, ‘When I say I’m in, I’m all in — 100% in.’ I’m not going to be there just to conduct my performances and then go.”
The “Fidelio” production was supposed to open the 2020-21 season and mark the beginning of Kim’s tenure with the company, but the COVID-19 pandemic upended those plans. Now she’s preparing Beethoven, looking forward to next year’s centennial season, and thinking long term about her goals for the company’s musical life.
Part of the problem, she says, is that there are only eight productions each season — and she is eager to conduct everything. For the time being, though, Kim has settled on a plan to conduct one Verdi and one Wagner opera each season, as well as cultivating the contemporary repertoire.
“The reason I picked Verdi among the Italian repertoire — not Puccini, but Verdi; I love every composer — is because Verdi is something I can build my relationship with the orchestra with,” she explained.
“The same thing with Wagner. I want to go through ‘Tristan,’ through the early operas, and through ‘Parsifal,’ so that when we get to ‘The Ring’ Cycle in five or six years I can do it with my orchestra, where even if I don’t say anything, they understand what I want.”
In addition to her San Francisco post, Kim is the principal guest conductor at Houston Grand Opera — a position that, like this one, came her way in part because of her ability to make a swift and strong impression.
“I heard her conducting ‘The Elixir of Love’ in Vienna,” said Patrick Summers, the company’s artistic and music director, “and within 30 seconds I knew the performance was in the hands of someone unique. Her control, her mastery, her lack of ego — the wrong kind of ego — all added up.”
Houston signed her for her U.S. debut, conducting Verdi’s “La Traviata” in 2017. But shortly before the curtain went up, a flood shut down the opera house, and performances were relocated.
“I knew she wasn’t going to be happy about making her debut in a convention center, but bless her, she said, ‘The company is rallying to do this despite a terrible tragedy. I admire that and I’ll stay with it,’ ” Summers recalled. “I already knew about her musicianship, but that told me everything about her as a person.”
Kim was born and raised in Seoul and took to the piano early. Her parents — her father was at one point the nation’s secretary of culture and tourism — were supportive of her musical interests, with her mother hoping Kim would have a career as a singer.
Even before she got to college, Kim understood that her stage fright as a pianist would interfere with any career goals in that direction. Then a music teacher suggested composition as an alternative pursuit. But another professor, seeing the ease and mastery with which she accompanied a college production of Puccini’s “La Bohème,” suggested conducting instead.
“You never know how your life’s path will go,” Kim said. “You can only know when you look back. I just started conducting out of curiosity, because he discovered my talent. It wasn’t like, ‘OK, I am going to become a conductor.’ ”
That moment did arrive, though, a few years later, when she won a competition to become an assistant conductor with the Teatro Real Madrid in Spain. She promptly gave up the job she had just begun as an accompanist in a small German opera company and never looked back.
Kim’s work ethic extends beyond music to include language — in addition to Korean and English, she speaks Spanish, German, Italian and French — and she credits that background for her ability to overcome initial skepticism among European musicians.
“There will always be skeptics,” she said, with a shrug. “I don’t think it’s personal. Look, if you came to Korea and said you were going to conduct Korean music, I would be skeptical. I would think, ‘Can he speak Korean? Does he know Korean culture? Does he really know what he’s talking about?’ I think it’s just a natural reaction.
“So if a German musician in a German orchestra when I conduct Wagner looks at me and thinks the same things, I understand. But I just have to show that he can trust his leader on the podium. That’s my job.”
Kim, who is just shy of her 41st birthday, now divides her time between San Francisco and Seoul. She has a husband, with a separate career in the arts, about whom she is otherwise tight-lipped. Even being asked basic questions about her personal life seemed to visibly throw her off when she was first named as music director in 2019.
“I don’t feel the obligation that I have to talk about my private life,” she said.
In part, this is a cultural difference between America, on the one hand, and Korea and Europe on the other.
“Where I grew up, you never ask about anyone’s private lives. I don’t know about colleagues’ lives that I have performed with 20 times — they don’t ask me, I don’t ask them,” she said. “I really want the audience to get a personal connection to the music. And for that, it’s not really relevant whether the conductor is married or not.”
“Fidelio”: San Francisco Opera. 7:30 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 14. Through Oct. 30. $26-$398. War Memorial Opera House, 301 Van Ness Ave., S.F. 415-864-3330. www.sfopera.com