Radu Paponiu will make his debut as music director of the San Francisco Symphony Youth Orchestra when he conducts the ensemble’s season-opening concert on Nov. 24 at Davies Symphony Hall. But he has been well familiar with the group for decades.
Born in Romania and having traversed a dozen music organizations in Europe and the U.S., Paponiu says he has met and admired veterans of SFSYO “everywhere,” so he regards the appointment as “a huge honor.”
He succeeds Daniel Stewart, who served as SFSYO’s music director for the past five years.
Paponiu, 35, began studying the violin at age 7 in Romania and then came to the U.S. as a teenager at the invitation of the Perlman Music Program. He completed two degrees in violin performance, studying with Robert Lipsett at the Colburn School in Los Angeles.
Paponiu is no stranger to youth orchestras, having been a member of both the Central European Initiative Youth Orchestra and the American Youth Symphony, and he just concluded a seven-year tenure as music director of the Naples Philharmonic Youth Orchestra in Florida. He has also served as associate conductor of the Naples Philharmonic and music director of the Southwest Florida Symphony Orchestra.
The Nov. 24 concert features saxophonist Harry Jo, winner of the 2024 SFSYO Concerto Competition, performing Takashi Yoshimatsu’s Cyber Bird Concerto. Paponiu is enthusiastic about the work, whose first movement, he says, is “a jazzy group of notes you can play in any way.” Jo, a senior at Amador Valley High School, plays in SFSYO’s first violin section. He started on piano at age 5 and took up violin at 8 and alto saxophone at 11.
The concert opens with Leonard Bernstein’s Overture to Candide and closes with Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 4, which, Paponiu says, “provides the young musicians an opportunity to learn how to listen to each other. … I love the idea of [giving them the] experience of playing this work for the first time.”
The SFSYO season continues on Dec. 15 with the annual holiday performance of Sergei Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf. Also on the program: one of Antonín Dvořák’s Slavonic Dances, selections from The Nutcracker, the traditional Hanukkah song “Mis Zeh Hidlik,” and an audience sing-along of carols.
On March 9, 2025, Paponiu conducts Mozart’s Symphony No. 35 (“Haffner”), Gabriela Lena Frank’s Elegía Andina, Richard Strauss’s Suite from Der Rosenkavalier, and Arturo Márquez’s Danzón No. 2.
Closing SFSYO’s season on May 18, 2025, Paponiu leads the orchestra in Anna Clyne’s This Midnight Hour (inspired by two poems by Charles Baudelaire and Juan Ramón Jiménez), Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s Petite Suite de Concert, and Hector Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique.
