“Oh, you’re with the symphony – what do you play?” It’s a sweaty August afternoon and Kayoko Dan, the new 33-year-old music director of the Chattanooga Symphony & Opera, is signing up for yoga lessons. Her sleek triathlete’s form, stone-smooth skin and 5-foot-short stature have misled the friendly NorthShore Yoga Studio clerk to guess she might play flute (which she does) or violin (which she doesn’t much anymore) but probably wouldn’t lead the band. “Most people don’t think of me as a conductor,” Dan observes. “I don’t fit a certain mold.”
New CSO conductor, Kayoko DanFor 20 years, Chattanoogans reveled in the baton play of another maestro who – with completely different methods – broke the mold. A former all-star baseball player with a slapstick bent, Bob Bernhardt juggled in his tuxedo and cracked jokes on stage. Under his direction, fun was the CSO shtick. This June, Bernhardt decrescendoed to a part-time Music Director Emeritus position, now leading only the Pops series. Dan, the former music director at the Central Kentucky Youth Orchestra in Lexington, was selected, after a two-year search among 250 candidates, to become the symphony’s 8th Music Director for classical and chamber music. She will be the first woman and the youngest person to gain that position.
This season, which opens Sept. 24, Dan tackles the repertory’s fullest works: “Carmina Burana,” Tchaikovsky’s “Symphony No. 4,” “Beethoven’s Fifth.” “He picked all these awesome pieces for this season,” gushes Dan. “I’m not nervous. I’m really happy about it.”
HOW DAN BEGAN
When she was 3, Dan asked for piano lessons. Neither of her parents has a musical background, she explains, but her 5-year-old neighbor enrolled at the Yamaha School “and whatever she did, that was the world.” During her youth, her father, a Japanese banker, moved the family to Kyoto, Tokyo, Houston, New York and, finally, back to Houston. Her musical studies “were frequently interrupted,” she notes. Yet she says she fell in love with classics while playing the flute in youth orchestra. “I felt like it was my voice at the time.”
As an undergraduate at the University of Texas, she took the program’s only conducting class then implored Professor Glenn Richter for more. “I felt the conducting classes we were required to take weren’t enough,” adds Dan. “So I begged to create more classes, and he agreed.”