Jooyong Ahn is a man who speaks the international language of music.
Born in Seoul, South Korea, he’s a U.S. citizen who has taught music and conducted orchestras for a good three decades now.
Ahn has traveled the globe, mentoring students, performing in operas, ballets and concerts across Europe, Asia and the Americas — and this Saturday, he’ll step onto the stage in Port Angeles.
One among eight candidates for permanent conductor of the Port Angeles Symphony, Ahn will appear alongside soloist Monique Mead, another well-traveled musician, in two performances: the 10 a.m. final rehearsal and the 7:30 p.m. concert, both at the Port Angeles High School Performing Arts Center, 304 E. Park Ave.
Mead “is a hot-shot player,” Ahn declared, adding that the piece she will play, Jean Sibelius’ Concerto for Violin and Orchestra in D Minor, has proven too difficult for many a violinist.
“Sibelius had in mind somebody to perform it,” back when he composed the work in 1904.
“That guy couldn’t handle it,” Ahn said.
As for Mead, well, she’s in love with this music.
“It’s my favorite violin concerto,” she said.
“It’s so moving,” a work that for her, opens the heart with its currents of sorrow and yearning.
In this cathartic music, “you’re not hiding behind something pretty or technically flashy,” she added.
Ahn, while rehearsing the orchestra earlier this week — in the Sibelius concerto plus Haydn’s 102nd Symphony and Elgar’s “Enigma Variations” — asked the players to relax. Don’t try to be perfect, he instructed.
“They’re pressured. The repertoire for this concert is heavy-duty stuff,” said the conductor. Rehearsal is the time to make mistakes.
Ahn discovered Port Angeles more than a decade ago, when he came to lead the orchestra in February 2004.
He was a guest conductor during the interim between the passing of longtime director Nico Snel and the hiring of Adam Stern, who served for nine years till last spring, when his contract was not renewed.
Ahn, soon after his visit to the North Olympic Peninsula, accepted a position at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga; he is a professor of conducting and the director of orchestras there.
But he never forgot Port Angeles.
When asked why he wants to return and lead the community orchestra here, Ahn spread his hands wide, motioning toward the Olympic Mountains and the Salish Sea.
It’s not so complex: Ahn wishes to make music, preferably in a beautiful place.
He finds the creations of Sibelius and Elgar to be well-suited to the North Olympic Peninsula.
These composers came from Finland and Britain respectively — chilly, northern places where music dispelled winter’s darkness.
As with each conductor candidate, audience members at both of Saturday’s concerts will have a chance to fill out forms evaluating Ahn.
He’s among the final three hopefuls for the Port Angeles Symphony’s top position; Wesley Schulz of the Bainbridge Symphony and Seattle Festival and Matthew Savery, conductor of the Bozeman, Mont., and Wyoming Symphony Orchestras, are yet to come this spring.
Port Angeles School District music teachers Ron Jones and James Ray and Peninsula College’s Kristin Quigley Brye are the local candidates, while Richard Sparks and Jonathan Pasternack, both orchestra directors at Texas universities, have already come to lead concerts in Port Angeles.
The symphony’s board of directors is expected to select the permanent conductor in May or June.
