Conductor Elena Sharkova will be back at the Santa Clara Mission Church on April 12, 2025 with another annual Serenade to Music concert with the Symphony San José Chorale and Symphony San José, featuring music by two contemporary composers from the Americas.
This year’s concert takes the audience on an ocean voyage, with The Secret of the Sea by American composer Jake Runestad (b. 1986), taking listeners on a dramatic nautical voyage with lyrics from Whitman, Longfellow and Inuit mythology.
Based in Minneapolis, composer and conductor Runestad has won many awards and commissions for compositions, and has been nominated for a Grammy Award. His music has been described as “stirring and uplifting.” The Secret of the Sea was commissioned for festival at the Sydney, Australia, Opera House.
“He has a very unique voice,” said Sharkova. “He’s able to write sophisticated music that is accessible to good volunteer and community choirs as well as professionals.”
The second half of the program takes the audience to Buenos Aires with Misa a Buenos Aires by Argentine composer Martín Palmeri (b. 1965). Written for a chorus, string ensemble, piano, and featuring the bandoneon, Misa combines the traditional Latin Mass* with tango rhythms and Latin American sonorities.
“It’s a fantastic piece,” said Sharkova. “It’s so exciting, the way he sets the words — almost mesmerizing.
“I became interested in the piece,” she continued, “because I am interested in the ways an ancient form — the Mass— can be melded with different cultures. For example, I’ve conducted a creole mass, Caribbean and bluegrass masses, as well as another tango mass.”
The two works are not often performed, said Sharkova, so she takes special pleasure in bringing them to one of her favorite concert venues, the Santa Clara Mission Church.
“It has the most incredible ambiance,” she told SV Voice last year. “It truly enhances everything good you have in your voice, in your instrument, in your in the harmonies. Just everything there makes [the sound] flourish.”
Sharkova grew up in the former Soviet Union, where her exceptional talent earned her a spot in a professional music education program at an early age. She graduated from a conservatory with degrees in piano and music education and subsequently earned a Master’s in conducting from the Petersburg State Rimski-Korsakov Conservatory.
The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 opened the professional door for her overseas and Sharkova came to the U.S. for a graduate program at Western Michigan University, “And that’s why I’m here,” she told SV Voice.
Currently the Artistic Director of Symphony San Jose Chorale and the Cantabile Youth Singers of Silicon Valley, Sharkova has earned an international reputation as a conductor and teacher and is noted for her interest in non-Western, cross-genre and multi-cultural music.
Serenade to Music is on Saturday, April 12 at 7:30 p.m. at the Santa Clara Mission Church, 500 El Camino Real, on the campus of Santa Clara University. Tickets are $25-$45. To buy tickets or for more information, visit www.symphonysanjose.org or call (408) 286-2600.
*The Mass is the principal liturgy in western (Latin) Christianity, based on the “Last Supper,” the ritual Jesus instituted the night before he was crucified. The musical form called a “mass” consists of musical settings of unchanging — “ordinary” — hymns and prayers of the liturgy, which were established by the 4th century C.E. Although masses have been written in other languages, most mass compositions are in Latin.
Carolyn Schuk can be reached at carolyn@santaclaraweekly.com.
