San Francisco Symphony Player Bios

[Derek Reaban]

Bill Williams



BILL WILLIAMS (trumpet) has had a distinguished career as an orchestral and chamber musician. Most recently he served as acting principal trumpet of the San Francisco Symphony from 2004-2008. During the four years he occupied the chair, he performed on numerous international concert tours and featured prominently as the principal trumpet on the San Francisco Symphony/Michael Tilson Thomas recordings of Mahler’s Fifth and Ninth Symphonies, the multiple Grammy Award-winning Mahler Symphony No. 7 and Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde. He was also a featured soloist with the San Francisco Symphony in subscription concert performances of Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No. 2 during the 2006-2007 season.

Prior engagements have included positions as principal trumpet of the Santa Fe Opera Orchestra, and as the solo trumpet of the Berne (Switzerland) Symphony Orchestra. He has performed as principal trumpet with other orchestras including the Syracuse Symphony, the Rochester Philharmonic, the City of Barcelona (Spain) Symphony Orchestra. As guest principal trumpet, he has performed with the Tonhalle Orchestra, the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande, the Malmo (Sweden) Symphony, and the Orchestre de Chambre de Lausanne.

In addition to his orchestral engagements, Williams is an active chamber musician/soloist and has performed with various ensembles performing repertoire from the Baroque to the Avant-Garde. His collaborations have included concerts with the Toronto-based Tafelmusik Baroque Orchestra, the Ensemble Modern of Frankfurt, Germany, and the American Bach Soloists. Recent solo projects have included recitals in Switzerland and the US. He has also been featured as a soloist with the Berne Symphony Orchestra at Amsterdam's Royal Concertgebouw Hall.

In addition to his performing activities, he has collaborated with noted sport psychologist Dr. Don Greene, and has presented lectures and master classes targeted at improving musicians' performance in stressful situations. As an educator, Mr. Williams has been a member of the visiting faculties of the University of Michigan and the Eastman School of Music.

A native of Connecticut, Bill studied at the Eastman School of Music, receiving the Bachelor of Music Degree with the Performer's Certificate. He is a recipient of the Master of Arts in Psychology from the New School for Social Research in New York City. Mr. Williams currently resides in San Francisco with his wife Margot and their young son.

Player bio taken from the American Bach Soloists website from 2009.
_________________
Derek Reaban
Tempe, Arizona
Tempe Winds / Symphony of the Southwest

[Derek Reaban]

Mark Inouye



Mark J. Inouye attended the University of California at Davis as a civil engineer before transferring and graduating from the Juilliard School, where he was a founding member of the Julliard Jazz Sextet at Lincoln Center. Equally at home playing classical and jazz music, has held principal trumpet positions with the Houston and Charleston symphony orchestras and has performed under the baton of Kurt Masur with the New York Philharmonic. He has also appeared as a guest artist at the Playboy Jazz Festival and with The Who at Carnegie Hall. As a soloist, Mr. Inouye performed the Tartini Violin Concerto arranged for trumpet with the Houston Symphony, as well as the Haydn and Tomasi concertos with the New World Symphony, and he performed the Carnival of Venice Variations by J. B. Arban and the Hummel Trumpet Concerto with the Tanglewood Wind Ensemble and Seiji Ozawa for volumes 3 and 4 of the video production Marsalis on Music. An active composer, he has premiered two of his jazz compositions, Find the Cheese and The Bull Behind the Horns, on the SFS Chamber Music Series; both of these works are featured on his debut album The Trumpet & The Bull. For more information about Mark Inouye and his album, visit his Web site at www.inouyejazz.com.

Player bio taken from the San Francisco Symphony website from 2009.
_________________
Derek Reaban
Tempe, Arizona
Tempe Winds / Symphony of the Southwest

[Derek Reaban]

Glenn Fischthal



Glenn Fischthal joined the San Francisco Symphony in 1980 and served as Principal Trumpet for twenty-four years. He currently serves as the Orchestra’s Associate Principal Trumpet, occupying the Peter Pastreich Chair. A native of New York State, Mr. Fischthal earned his bachelor’s degree at the Cleveland Institute of Music and continued with graduate studies at the California Institute of the Arts. His teachers have included Bernard Adelstein, Thomas Stevens, Frank Kadarabek, and Robert Nagel.

Mr. Fischthal’s orchestral career began at age twenty-one, when he joined the Cleveland Orchestra on tour under the direction of George Szell and Pierre Boulez. He has been a member of the National Ballet of Canada Orchestra and Kansas City Philharmonic, and has served as principal trumpet for the Hong Kong Philharmonic, Santa Fe Opera Orchestra, San Diego Symphony, and Israel Philharmonic. During his tenure in Israel, the IPO recorded all of the Leonard Bernstein symphonies under the direction of Mr. Bernstein and made numerous recordings under the direction of Zubin Mehta.

Mr. Fischthal has been soloist with the SFS in trumpet concertos of Haydn and Hummel and Torelli’s Sonata for Trumpet and Strings, and he has been featured in Stravinsky’s L’Histoire du soldat. He has performed with the summer festival orchestras of Grand Teton and Sun Valley and has recorded for Deutsche Grammophon, London, CBS Masterworks, Telarc, Nonesuch, and Philips. He was recently featured as posthorn soloist on the SFS recording of Mahler’s Symphony No. 3, which earned a Grammy for Best Classical Album.

Player bio taken from the San Francisco Symphony website from 2009.
_________________
Derek Reaban
Tempe, Arizona
Tempe Winds / Symphony of the Southwest

[Derek Reaban]

Chris Bogios



In his four decades with the San Francisco Symphony, trumpeter Chris Bogios has toured internationally about 15 times with the various maestros under whom he's played: Josef Krips, Seiji Ozawa, Edo de Waart, Herbert Blomstedt and Michael Tilson Thomas.

There have been thrilling musical moments with all of them. Performing with Ozawa and the dissident Russian cellist Mstislav Rostropovich in Moscow in 1973 during the Cold War. Playing Bruckner with Blomstedt at the Salzburg Festival in the 1980s, when George Solti was so wowed by the orchestra he asked to come here to conduct it. Doing Mahler's Ninth with Thomas in Vienna last year.

But when it comes to post-concert parties, none can match the bash Ozawa threw in Tokyo in 1975, when he returned triumphantly to his native Japan leading an American orchestra. After a smashing performance of Ravel's "Daphnis et Chloe,'' Ozawa treated the musicians to a lavish spread with sushi, Kobe beef and Russian vodka, and hired Japanese magicians to entertain them.

"He gave the greatest orchestra party of any conductor in the 43 years I've been here,'' says Bogios, 68, a lively and amusing San Francisco native who's the last of the orchestra's hometown musicians. He and violinist Michael Gerling, who also joined in 1961, have been with the orchestra longer than anyone else.

This week Bogios hits the road again when the Symphony takes off on a six- city southern European tour.

Touring can be a grind -- traveling and playing almost every day without much rest -- but Bogios is always game. He's particularly excited about playing in Athens, the last stop on the orchestra's tour of Spain, Italy and Greece. It's the first time the Symphony has played in the country where Bogios' parents were born, and where most of his cousins live.

"It's a big deal for me,'' says Bogios, who grew up in a Greek enclave in San Francisco's Bayview District and learned to play trumpet in the public schools. "I thought I was never going to play in the country of my family.''

Bogios, whose son Jimmy is the drummer with Counting Crows and whose son Gus plays bass with various bands around town, took up the cornet at Portola Junior High and started playing trumpet at Balboa High. With his working- class background, "I feel like I should be a stagehand here or something,'' says Bogios, a sturdy guy with a shiny pate, chatting in a Davies Hall dressing room.

As a kid, his constant practicing drove his mother crazy.

"She would say to me in Greek, 'Skazmos! Shut up! I can't stand it anymore. All day long -- toot, toot, toot, toot.' I don't think she understood what it meant to me,'' says Bogios, whose jazz-wise speech brings actor Danny Aiello to mind.

While studying music at San Francisco State, Bogios worked in dance bands, Latin and theater pit orchestras. He sought out Charlie Bubbs, the Symphony's principal trumpet, and took lessons with him. Bubbs -- who played under Pierre Monteux here and fondly recalled the orchestra touring the East Coast by train in 1948 -- had been Bogios' main man since high school, when the young trumpeter got free tickets to the Symphony's Standard Oil radio broadcast concerts at the Opera House.

Bogios made his first tour, to Japan, in 1968 with Krips, the Viennese conductor whose strong suit was the Germanic repertoire ("If he did a French work like 'La Mer,' we called it 'Das Mer,' '' Bogios says with a laugh). They performed Bruckner's Symphony No. 7 at the Osaka International Music Festival. "Bringing a piece like Bruckner's 7th to Japan in the '60s was really taking a chance in a way, but it was well received,'' Bogios says.

The orchestra hadn't toured in years, so there were no provisions in the musicians' contract pertaining to touring. Bogios was one of the players who negotiated the tour conditions, making sure the musicians had two days off a week. Over the years, touring has become more demanding, with less down time.

Bogios has made so many tours that some he recalls as "just going and schlepping through Europe.'' But he vividly remembers the orchestra's momentous trip to the Soviet Union -- Russia, Lithuania and Latvia -- with Ozawa in '73, years before glasnost. There were armed soldiers at the Moscow airport, concerts halls overflowing with people hungry to hear a visiting orchestra.

"It was a big happening,'' says Bogios, who heard from Rostropovich years later that Ozawa had told the Soviet authorities that the orchestra wouldn't perform if Rostropovich were not allowed to play. They did the Dvorak Cello Concerto "and the feeling was just electric,'' says Bogios. It's wonderful, he adds, playing historic Russian and European halls where the great composers and orchestras have played. And hanging out with local musicians.

In Leningrad -- the Soviet name of the city once again called St. Petersburg -- some Russian brass players invited the San Francisco brass players to a party in a hotel room rented for the occasion. The Americans had just attended a bash at the U.S. Consulate but felt it would be rude not to party with their Russian colleagues.

"They were not rich people, but they spent all this money on smoked fish and really good stuff,'' says Bogios, who later sent the Russians American mouthpieces. "It was fantastic, because we didn't eat too well over there in '73. Except for the soup and bread, there were some really lousy meals. One of our trombone players passed out and they had to carry him out. Yeah, throwing back too much vodka.''

Celebrations aside, touring is no picnic. It's a challenge to play at your peak when you're on the road. There's a lot of pressure, Bogios says, particularly on the first-chair players.

Often, he says, "you fly in on the day you're going to play. You come in late in the afternoon, you have a couple hours off and then you have to put on the concert. You don't feel physically the same as you would at home, let alone the jet lag. But you come out and play the best you can, even though you may be physically feeling lousy, especially at the beginning.

"It's like the 49ers -- you come back. You come back and beat Arizona in the last quarter.'' Bogios recalls the '99 European tour with Thomas when about 60 percent of the orchestra got sick and Thomas missed two performances.

A string section player might be able to stay in bed, but "when you're playing a brass instrument, unless you're dead, you go out there and play,'' Bogios says. "Glenn (Fischthal, the orchestra's associate principal trumpet) has played many times with a fever. You tighten your belt.''

Bogios, who played second trumpet for 25 years, switched to third trumpet a few years ago; he wanted to scale back and play a little less.

"I'm not playing as much as I used to, but I still have to keep up my chops because I want to sound good,'' the trumpeter says. On tour, he shows up at the hall 30 or 40 minutes before curtain to "warm up and get my chops moving.'' In his salad days, he used to go see the sights as soon as the orchestra hit a city. "Now maybe I'd take an hour's nap first.''

One of the pleasures of touring is exposing European audiences to the bold American sound and personality of the San Francisco Symphony. The orchestra always played with spirit and feeling, Bogios says, but it's much better technically than it was when he joined.

"There's a depth there, and emotion, and we try to play really musically, '' says Bogios, who also plays Greek weddings and sat in with Ben Folds at the Fillmore when his son was in the band ("the highlight of my symphonic career, '' he says).

Bogios still takes enormous pride and pleasure in playing "in a great orchestra, surrounded by all these great musicians. I'm able to go out there and be in the middle of this sound. It's been a fantastic gig,'' says the local boy who made good.

Player interview taken from SFGate website from November 3, 2004.
_________________
Derek Reaban
Tempe, Arizona
Tempe Winds / Symphony of the Southwest

[Derek Reaban]

Jeff Biancalana



Born and raised in the Chicago area, trumpeter Jeff Biancalana began his formal studies at the Eastman School of Music. Since graduating, he has performed with a variety of ensembles, some of which include the Milwaukee Symphony, Chicago Chamber Musicians, New York Philharmonic, Chicago Sinfonietta, Chicago Chamber Musicians, New World Symphony, New York Big Brass, Buffalo Philharmonic, Music of the Baroque-Chicago, Houston Grand Opera, Chicago Contemporary Players, the Rochester Philharmonic, the New York Big Brass, and the Bay Brass.

In addition to coaching chamber ensembles at Boston University's Tanglewood Institute, Mr. Biancalana has also worked with students at Louisiana State University, the Harrid Conservatory, the New England Conservatory, University of the Pacific, Fredonia State College of New York, Sacramento State University, University of Mississippi, San Francisco Youth Orchestra, the San Francisco Conservatory, San Jose State University, and at the Eastman School. Mr. Biancalana is the primary coach for “Brassissimo Vienna”, a brass quintet now under Columbia Management. In addition, Jeff is a spokesman and clinician for Conn/Selmer Corporation USA, Inc.

Mr. Biancalana has recorded extensively with various groups, and can be heard on labels such as Argo/Decca (music of Paul Schoenfield, and Ingolf Dahl/New World Symphony), d’Note Entertainment (Music of the Baroque, Chicago), Sony Classical, (Eastman Wind Ensemble), Cedille Records (Chicago Sinfonietta), Teldec Classics International ( N.Y. Philharmonic), and PollyRhythm Productions (Chicago Chamber Musicians). Most recently, Jeff has recorded the entire Mahler Symphony cycle along with “Das Lied von der Erde”, playing 2nd trumpet with the San Francisco Symphony, Michael Tilson Thomas conducting, under the label of SFS Media Productions.

Formally associate principal trumpet of the Colorado Music Festival, Jeff now spends his summer months performing with two premier festival orchestras--the Sun Valley Summer Symphony, and the Grand Teton Music Festival in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. Currently, Mr. Biancalana is principal trumpet of the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, is an adjunct faculty member at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, and has been acting 2nd trumpet of the San Francisco Symphony since 2001.

Player bio taken from CSUEB Department of Music from 2009.
_________________
Derek Reaban
Tempe, Arizona
Tempe Winds / Symphony of the Southwest

[Derek Reaban]

William Thieck



William Adelbert Thieck was born in Mecklenburg, Germany, near the North Sea on March 27, 1883. He emigrated to the United States in 1905. Thieck was Principal trumpet of the Russian Symphony in about 1906-1908 (reference page 8, "Some Principals in Great Orchestra". Iowa City Daily Press. Iowa City, Iowa. April 22, 1909 as found at Russian Symphony Orchestra Society of New York). He was then Principal trumpet of the Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra from 1912-1920, and then served as Principal trumpet of the San Francisco Symphony for one season (1921-1922).

William Thieck authored at least two trumpet method books entitled: Daily Studies for Cornet and Trumpet, 1928 and The Art of Trumpet Playing

1906-1908.....Principal Trumpet Russian Symphony (New York City)
1912-1920.....Principal Trumpet Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra
1921-1922.....Principal Trumpet San Francisco Symphony
_________________
Derek Reaban
Tempe, Arizona
Tempe Winds / Symphony of the Southwest