Conductor Sarah Hicks creates her own niche in the live-to-picture field

While women conductors are rapidly gaining more opportunities in opera and symphonic music, they remain rare in the world of cinematic music, including movie screenings with live orchestral accompaniment.

“There are certainly younger women who are breaking into the field,” said Sarah Hicks, a San Francisco-based conductor. “But of my generation, I’m the only person doing anything at my level. In terms of traveling the world and specializing in this, I am to my knowledge the only woman.”

As part of the CSO at the Movies series, Hicks will join the Chicago Symphony Orchestra on Jan. 10-11, as they perform the Oscar-winning score for “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon — The Film With Orchestra,” alongside a screening of the 2000 movie directed by Ang Lee.

Although this run does not technically mark Hicks’ CSO debut, it will nonetheless be a much higher-profile assignment than her last appearance a decade or so ago, when she led a set of educational concerts. “It’s been a hot minute, as they say,” she said. “So I’m excited to be back.”

“Crouching Tiger” features a score by Tan Dun, the Chinese-born American classical composer, whose major works include Water Passion after St. Matthew (2000), written to mark the 250th anniversary of the death of Johann Sebastian Bach.

“I think it’s an incredibly beautiful movie,” Hicks said. “The music is exquisite because it is Tan Dun.”

She has conducted this score only once before. Orchestras tend to shy away from it, she said, because it requires a solo cellist and soloist on the pipa, a kind of lute. For these concerts, those roles will be filled by John Sharp, the CSO’s principal cello, and guest artist Yang Wei on pipa.

Born in Tokyo, Hicks grew up in Hawaii. After earning her artist’s diploma in conducting from the Curtis School of Music in Philadelphia, Hicks, 54, at first followed a conventional classical-music path. She served for one season as an assistant conductor at the Verbier (Switzerland) Festival Orchestra, under James Levine, and held several other early posts, including associate conductor of the Richmond (Virginia) Symphony and resident conductor of the Florida Philharmonic.

“ ‘Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon’ an incredibly beautiful movie. The music is exquisite because it is Tan Dun.” — conductor Sarah Hicks

Hicks still leads two or three sets of classical concerts a year, but in 2005-06 that she decided that she did not want to focus on that repertoire. The turning point for her was working with Pink Martini, a band that gained almost instant popularity in the 1990s with its melding of classical, jazz and vintage pop. (It will perform Feb. 28, 2025, under the auspices of Symphony Center Presents as part of its 30th anniversary tour.)

“I thought these guys are really on to something,” she said. “That’s when I really decided that I didn’t need to record my Mahler cycle ever, that I wanted to do something that would be ever-varying and challenging and also developing and not static like I saw the classical world being.”

She noted that many classical concerts are presented today almost exactly as they would have been 50 years ago or before. “I wanted to be a part of something that might feel more forward-looking, and in a way, progressive,” she said. “I don’t regret making that switch.”

Since 2009, she has served as principal conductor of the Minnesota Orchestra’s Live at Orchestra Hall, essentially the orchestra’s pops series. Otherwise, she is what she calls an “independent contractor.” “So the majority of my work comes in year to year,” she said. “It is an incredible variety, depending on what year you are talking about.”

In addition to those few classical concerts each year, she continues cross to genre boundaries, working with artists such as rock vocalist Sting, singer-songwriters Ben Rector and Cody Fry and rap artist Dessa. But 65-70 percent of her time is devoted to film work, primarily what is known in the industry as “live to picture” — screenings with live orchestral accompaniment.

Orchestras are increasingly realizing that if they are to find new ticket-buyers, they have to change up their programming and try new concert formats. Film music, with its ready ties to families and younger adults, has emerged in the last few decades as a popular option.

In April 2001, the CSO ventured into film music with live performances of Charlie Chaplin’s score for “City Lights” (1931), alongside screenings of the classic silent film. The run’s success led to the establishment in 2004-05 of the popular CSO at the Movies series, which often sells out.

Hicks’ first venture into “live to picture” was a 2009 presentation of “Psycho” (1960) with the Minnesota Orchestra. She quickly realized she had a knack for these specialized concerts, which require the conductor to synchronize what is onscreen with the orchestra’s playing, using cues in the score and a special video showing on the podium.

“That’s how my brain works,” she said. “It processes visual and audio inputs in a way that are easy for me to coordinate things, but also easy for me to think forward and fix things on the go. I love details, and I love chaos. If you like those things, film conducting is for you.”

Hicks has an amazing 57 movies in her repertoire, and she might do 20 or so in a year. “I’ve done ’Fantasia’ more times than I can remember,” she said. Also high on the list is the original “Stars Wars” film, which was later retitled “Star Wars: Episode IV — A New Hope.”

Because she was one of the first conductors in the genre, other orchestras started calling her because they knew she could handle the assignment. In 2012, she oversaw the San Francisco Symphony’s world premiere of the still-touring “Pixar in Concert,” which contained excerpts from the 14 Pixar films that existed at the time.

Since 2019, Hicks has served as an adviser to Disney Music Group and has frequently collaborated with Disney Concerts, doing final edits on concert scores and formalizing conductor videos. One of the big challenges of “live-to-picture” is creating a through score for a concert presentation from the segmented musical sections used in the film.

“This has been a matter of taking one entity and creating it into another and finding ways to best accomplish that,” she said.

With the enthusiasm of movie screenings with live orchestral accompaniment only growing, it is clear that the presentations are more than a passing trend. And Hicks sees the format continuing well into the future.

“Films will always be popular,” she said. “Live music will always exist in the world even with AI. People still like to see other people do cool things. Maybe there is a logical lifespan for live to film, because of technological developments, etc. But for the near future, I just don’t see how this will not continue to be popular, because you do want to see, especially for nostalgia, your favorite films that are incomparably enhanced with live players.”