Managing Director

Sharon Lehmer Gustavson has been Managing Director since 1986 and has sung as a choir member (alto) since 1982. Her work encompasses a wide range of activities, including running all of the activities of the administrative office, coordinating the concert calendar, managing the box office, overseeing all written communication for brochures and publicity, and choir recruitment, as well as fundraising and strategic planning.

"Looking back on the somewhat circuitous path I have forged in music for myself, I guess I should not find it strange to be right back where I began, but now and again it does strike me as odd. I grew up with choral music; both my parents were singers, and my father spent most of his life directing choirs. But after singing in school and church choirs, and working as a church soloist in college and the early days of my marriage, I picked up my violin again during my child-rearing years. One of my daughters began studying it, and I was fascinated with early childhood education, and somehow one thing led to another and I ended up spending 14 years running my own violin studio.

When my husband and I took our teen-age daughters to the first Messiah sing-along held at Davies Symphony Hall, I suddenly remembered that I loved to sing. Being in the middle of this outrageously tubby choir-cum-audience with all the different vocal parts roaring forth, I finally had my Woodstock experience. When one of the parents of a student introduced me to the San Francisco Bach Choir, I joined in a heartbeat and have been singing ever since. Somewhere in the process, my kids grew up, early childhood education became less of a compelling mystery, and I became Managing Director of the choir. Now I spend my days pushing all the same pieces of the puzzle around that my father did.

The question is still this: just how do you make music happen? My job is to see that the thousands of practical parts that make a choir, a concert, a season, and ultimately, a decades-long era of glorious music effectively hang together and work organizationally. On the whole, its pretty creative work, mixed in with inspired drudgery, but the rewards are golden. The goal is great music, beautifully sung, that speaks to the hearts of many, including those of the singing members themselves. I am blessed that over the 20 odd years I have been doing this, I have been in the company of not one, but two, remarkable Artistic Directors who have shared and expanded the musical vision and the organizational manual of how to hands-on, do-it-yourself, make music!"