MIKE CORNER
Michael Corner is the Principal Clarinetist of Symphony Silicon Valley. He served as the Principal Clarinet of the former San Jose Symphony since 1983 and was regularly featured as soloist in works by Debussy, Weber, Copland, Mozart, and others. He has served as both Principal Clarinet and soloist with San Jose Chamber Orchestra, Sinfonia San Francisco, Midsummer Mozart, Mendocino Music Festival, Colorado Music Festival, and Marin Symphony. He’s performed as Principal Clarinet with virtually all of the SF Bay Area’s Symphonies, including Oakland, California, Santz Cruz, Modesto, Berkeley, SF Opera Merola, Opera San Jose, West Bay Opera, and others. He has performed with the Boston Symphony, San Francisco Symphony, San Francisco Opera, San Francisco Ballet, Stockholm Philharmonic, Zurich Tonhalle Orchestra, Lausanne Chamber Orchestra, and others in Europe and the USA..
As a chamber musician, Mr. Corner appears regularly as one of the Music at the Mission Chamber Players, where he was featured on an entire program of clarinet repertoire in 2015. He also performs regularly with the Santa Cruz Chamber Players, on the Sierra Chamber Music Society Series in Walnut Creek, and has performed in such venues as Kohl Mansion, San Jose Chamber Music Society, Old First Concerts, Legion of Honor, Palo Alto Cultural Center, and many others.
An active theater musician, he serves as Principal Clarinet for Ballet Silicon Valley. He is first call on clarinet, saxophone and flute for Broadway San Jose, and has frequently performed in the the Golden Gate, Curran and Orpheum theaters in San Francisco; including as Principal Clarinet for Baz Luhrmann’s recent production and studio recording of Puccini’s La Bohème. An accomplished jazz musician, he has appeared at such Bay Area venues as Yoshi’s and Kimball’s, and has performed and recorded with the Radio Big Bands in Frankfurt, Germany and Zurich, Switzerland.
Mr. Corner maintains a state of the art teaching studio in Los Altos, California. He has provided private and group instruction on clarinet and saxophone for over 30 years. His students can be found in all of the major Youth Symphony Orchestras in the San Francisco Bay Area, and have regularly appeared as soloists with them. He is currently serving as Woodwind Coach/Coordinator for the California Youth Symphony, the Peninsula Youth Symphony, and the San Jose Youth Symphony Senior Orchestras . After High School, his students regularly attend pretigious institutions such as Yale, Princeton, Columbia, MIT, Stanford and UC Berkeley, and have been accepted as Music Majors at leading music schools such as Northwestern, USC, UCLA, Indiana University, and the Berklee School of Music in Boston.
Mr. Corner attended the University of Southern California, graduating Magna Cum Laude, and was an award winner at both the Music Academy of the West and the Berkshire Music Center in Tanglewood. While a student at USC, he won First Prize in the Coleman Chamber Music Competition. He later received a Soloists Diploma from the Basel (Switzerland) Conservatory. His primary teachers are Mitchell Lurie and Hans Rudolf Stalder.
Michael Corner is a proud endorser of F. Artur Uebel clarinets, Lomax Classic mouthpieces, and Silverstein ligatures.
