Dr. Jason Klein, Music Director
A native of Kansas City, Jason Klein has enjoyed a long and varied career as a conductor and educator at almost every level. He received his BA from Washington University in St. Louis and his Masters and Doctorate in Orchestral Conducting from Stanford University, where he was a National Defense Education Act (NDEA) Fellow, a competitive federal fellowship for doctoral study.
Dr. Klein has held music directorships with the Fremont Symphony, University of Utah, Utah Youth Symphony, South Valley Symphony, and the Youth Orchestra of Southern Alameda County. He was Associate Conductor of the acclaimed Oregon Coast Music Festival for twenty-four seasons. He has guest-conducted widely and is highly respected for his knowledge of the music profession, historical insight, and collegial manner.
Throughout his career, Dr. Klein has been highly praised for his imaginative, sophisticated yet audience-friendly programs. He has made a specialty of resurrecting strong, attractive works of once celebrated composers whose music has fallen into undeserved obscurity, and of reviving lesser-known works by the great masters.
Saratoga Symphony
Founded over three decades ago as a home for local musicians seeking a worthy outlet for their craft, the Saratoga Symphony has grown into a 45-member community orchestra that performs regularly at venues around Saratoga, California, including St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church and the McAfee Performing Arts Center. From the start, the orchestra’s mission has been to give local musicians a serious artistic home, and to give audiences access to music they’d otherwise never hear performed live.
The Saratoga Symphony, under the direction of Jason Klein, has been a trail blazer for performing long neglected works, compositions shunned by other orchestras but nevertheless worthy of being brought back to life. The orchestra’s 2005 revival of the Piano Concerto of Eric Zeisl was noted in the San Jose Mercury News as one of the Top Ten Classical Music Events of the Season in the Bay Area.
In 2023, the orchestra gave the West Coast’s second-ever performance of Busoni’s epic yet rarely heard 1904 Piano Concerto, with pianist Tamami Honma. This came only two months after the San Francisco Symphony had given the first performance. The reason for the work’s lack of exposure is that it is one of the longest piano concertos in the repertoire, running at around 70 minutes. It also requires a male choir in the last movement and it makes extraordinary demands on the piano soloist. All of these factors make this monumental work difficult to program.
On another front, Arnold Böcklin’s Isle of the Dead was one of the most reproduced images of its era: a haunting, dreamlike scene, painted in five versions between 1880 and 1886, of a shrouded figure being ferried toward a rocky, tomb-lined island. It resonated with profound late-19th-century anxieties over mortality and the mystery of what lies beyond. The sense of eerie stillness that speaks to the tragedy of irreversible loss through death proved just as irresistible to composers as it did to painters and poets, inspiring one of the most remarkable clusters of musical responses to a single image in the classical repertoire. In the last few years the Saratoga Symphony has performed every major musical interpretation of the painting, including Rachmaninoff’s well-known tone poem alongside lesser-known settings by Max Reger, Heinrich Schulz-Beuthen, Felix Woyrsch, and Andreas Hallén.
Florent Schmitt was a French composer whose vivid, individualistic orchestral voice made him one of the most respected figures in French music during his lifetime, yet whose works, like so many the Saratoga Symphony champions, largely disappeared from concert programs after his death in 1958. In January 2027, Saratoga Symphony will present Schmitt’s Feuillets de voyage, a suite featuring the composer’s own orchestration of five numbers drawn from his two eponymous sets of piano duets composed between 1903 and 1905. We believe the performance will be the first anywhere in the world in over thirty years, and the first in the United States in more than a century, since the Chicago Symphony Orchestra performed the work under Frederick Stock in 1922. It follows Jason Klein’s performance last season of another early Schmitt rarity, Reflets d’Allemagne, and has drawn attention from Schmitt scholars and enthusiasts, including on the Florent Schmitt website, which is tracking Schmitt performances worldwide this season.
In October 2024, Saratoga Symphony performed British-American composer Felix Borowski’s Piano Concerto in D minor with pianist Daniel Glover, a work that had gone unheard since its 1914 premiere by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. Despite being on the precipice of the modernistic era in which tonality was all but dispatched into oblivion, Borowski remained faithful to the idea of a concerto as a brilliant melodious vehicle for soloist and orchestra. Perhaps because of his unwillingness to join the avant-garde, his works fell into obscurity but this work’s lush romantic style made it a worthy contender to be resurrected. Daniel Glover rejoins us in this 2026-27 season to perform Sergei Prokofiev’s Piano Concerto No. 2, not the most popular of his five piano concertos but widely considered to be his best.