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John Mauceri

conductor

About this Artist

JOHN MAUCERI is the Chancellor of the University of North Carolina School of the Arts (UNCSA) and the Founding Director of the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra. His distinguished and extraordinary career has taken him not only to over 25 of the world’s greatest opera companies and more than 50 symphony orchestras, but also the musical stages of Broadway and Hollywood, as well as the most prestigious halls of academia.

Mauceri has served as music director of four opera companies: Washington (National), Scottish (Glasgow), the Teatro Regio (Turin, Italy), and Pittsburgh. He is the first American to have held the post of music director of an opera house in either Great Britain or Italy. He was the first music director of the American Symphony Orchestra in Carnegie Hall after its founding director, Leopold Stokowski, with whom he studied. He was Consultant for Music Theater at Washington’s Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts for more than a decade, and, for 15 years, he served on the faculty of Yale University. For 18 years, Mauceri worked closely with Leonard Bernstein and conducted many of the composer’s premieres at Bernstein’s request.

On Broadway, he was co-producer of On Your Toes, and served as musical supervisor for Hal Prince’s production of Candide as well as Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Song and Dance. He also conducted the orchestra for the film version of Evita. Among his many awards and honors are a Tony, Grammy, Billboard, Olivier, and two Emmys. Last year, his recording of Erich Korngold’s Between Two Worlds was selected by Gramophone magazine as one of the 250 Greatest Recordings of All Time. In April, Gramophone named two of his recordings with the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra among the “10 great studio re-creations” of classic movie soundtracks.

Mauceri holds the lifetime title of Founding Director of the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra, which was created in 1991 by the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and with which he led over 300 concerts to a total audience of over 4 million people. He has written for and appeared on radio and television and has delivered keynote speeches and papers for major artistic and educational institutions, such as Harvard University, the American Academy in Berlin, the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, the American Musicological Society, and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. He recently published articles for Cambridge University Press and Gramophone magazine.

Mauceri has taken the lead in the preservation and performance of many genres of music and has supervised/conducted important premieres by composers as diverse as Debussy, Stockhausen, Korngold, Hindemith, Bernstein, Ives, Elfman, and Shore. He is a leading performer of music banned by the Third Reich and especially music of Hollywood’s émigré composers, and can be seen and heard on many recent DVD releases of classic films.

As Chancellor of UNCSA, Mauceri has led America’s first public arts conservatory for five years. Located in Winston-Salem, the University includes music, dance, drama, filmmaking, and design and production curricula for high school, college, and graduate degrees.

Recent performances include an October 2010 debut in Spain at the Bilbao Opera as musical director of Susannah, with composer Carlisle Floyd present; and a November 2010 debut in Denmark with the Danish National Orchestra, conducting “Emigrés and Protégés – The Hollywood Diaspora.” He has just completed a critically acclaimed run as musical director and artistic supervisor of Rodgers & Hammerstein’s Oklahoma!, an all-UNCSA production and restoration of the original 1943 Broadway production which has been videotaped for future broadcast.

One of the world’s preeminent experts on film music, Chancellor Mauceri appeared on June 29 at an event celebrating the life of film composer Bernard Herrmann, at WQXR in New York City, which can be heard online at WNYC’s The Greene Space. In addition, a studio recording of George and Ira Gershwin’s 1930 hit Broadway musical, Strike Up the Band, conducted by Mauceri, has just been released by PS Classics. John Mauceri recently made his debut at the Aspen Music Festival conducting his edition of Dmitri Shostakovich’s score to Hamlet, adapted from the 1964 Soviet film score for six actors and symphony orchestra.