SF Ballet Music Director & Principal Conductor Martin West leads the SF Ballet Orchestra in rehearsal (copyright Erik Tomasson)

What a week! I’m so proud to be the music director of the Orchestra—they’ve received such deservedly great reviews for Coppélia. It’s as if they’ve been playing it all their lives but actually, most of them saw the music for the first time, four days before we opened!

As soon as we’re done performing Program 5, we’re all heading off to Skywalker studios in Marin to record a CD of highlights from Coppélia and Sylvia, which we hope will be out in the fall (this will be the Orchestra’s first recording since Tchaikovsky’s Nutcracker). We’ve already started rehearsing for Programs 6 & 7.

We look forward to playing Chroma and having the composer Joby Talbot here. We’ve rented 15 cow bells and five gongs and will have a huge orchestra of instruments to accompany the work.  What a difference the rock-inspired Chroma will be after this week, not to mention Petrouchka, Underskin, Wheeldon’s new ballet Number Nine, as well as Ghosts and 7 for Eight. Thank goodness I have my great colleague and friend Emil de Cou who is here to help me conduct all this incredible music.