Paul Phillips

Guest Conductor Session 3

Paul Phillips is the Gretchen B. Kimball Director of Orchestral Studies and Associate Professor of Music at Stanford University, where he conducts the Stanford Symphony Orchestra, Stanford Philharmonia, and Stanford Summer Symphony, and teaches conducting, musicology, and interdisciplinary courses. He has conducted over 75 orchestras, opera companies, choirs, and ballet troupes worldwide, including the San Francisco Symphony, Dallas Symphony, Detroit Symphony, Orquesta Sinfónica de Salta, Netherlands Radio Chamber Orchestra and Chamber Choir, Opera Providence, and Paul Taylor Dance Company. His five Naxos recordings include Music for Great Films of the Silent Era (Parts 1 and 2) with the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra (Ireland); Toujours Provence with the Slovak Philharmonic Orchestra; and Manhattan Intermezzo and Anthony Burgess: Orchestral Music with the Brown University Orchestra. He has also recorded with the Iceland Symphony Orchestra. In March 2022 he brought Stanford Philharmonia to Bermuda to perform at the Bermuda Festival of the Performing Arts, and has previously led orchestral tours to China, Ireland, and Germany. With a repertoire of over 1000 works spanning much of the classical and pops repertoire, Phillips has performed with Itzhak Perlman, Joseph Kalichstein, Christopher O’Riley, and Carol Wincenc; collaborated with Steve Reich, William Bolcom, George Walker, and many other composers; and led concerts featuring Dizzy Gillespie, Dave Brubeck, Ray Charles, Dionne Warwick, Tony Bennett, Glen Campbell, and many other jazz and pop stars. His honors include 11 ASCAP Awards for Adventurous Programming of Contemporary Music, 1st Prize in the NOS International Conductors Course (Holland) and Wiener Meisterkurse Conductors Course (Vienna), and selection for the Exxon/Arts Endowment Conductors Program.

 

Studies at Eastman, Columbia, and the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music, and at Tanglewood with Leonard Bernstein, Kurt Masur, Seiji Ozawa, and Leonard Slatkin, led to conducting posts in Europe and the US, including the Frankfurt Opera, Stadttheater Lüneburg, Greensboro Symphony, Greensboro Opera, Maryland Symphony, Savannah Symphony, and Rhode Island Philharmonic. Phillips joined the Stanford University faculty in 2017 after having served as Director of Orchestras and Chamber Music at Brown University from 1989-2017 and Music Director/Conductor of the Pioneer Valley Symphony Orchestra and Chorus in Massachusetts from 1994-2017. He has led numerous workshops and clinics, including a 2019 Conductors Guild Conductor Training Workshop at Stanford featuring guest composer Gabriela Lena Frank, and performed widely as a pianist, including at the Piccolo Spoleto Festival, Orvieto Musica, Carnegie Recital Hall, and Lincoln Center. He has received numerous commissions and awards for his compositions, which are published by Barnard Street Music. In December 2022, Munich’s Bayerische Staatsoper released Mavra/Iolanta, a video of its acclaimed 2019 production of Stravinsky’s opera Mavra (using Phillips’s chamber arrangement published by Boosey & Hawkes) combined with Tchaikovsky’s opera Iolanta.

 

Phillips’s book A Clockwork Counterpoint: The Music and Literature of Anthony Burgess, a groundbreaking examination of the work of the famed British composer-novelist, has been hailed in the press as “prodigiously researched, elegantly written” and “seamlessly fascinating”; his second book, The Devil Prefers Mozart: On Music and Musicians 1962-1993 by Anthony Burgess, which he compiled and edited, is scheduled to be published later this year. Phillips’s essays are published in six other books, including the Norton Critical Edition of A Clockwork Orange. Phillips is President of the Western Region of the College Orchestra Directors Association and serves as Music Advisor to the International Anthony Burgess Foundation in Manchester, England. For further information, visit www.paulsphillips.com.

 

 

ABOUT THE STANFORD SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA

 

The Stanford Symphony Orchestra is one of the America’s leading collegiate orchestras, with a distinguished history dating back to 1891, the year that Stanford University was founded. With a membership of about 100 undergraduate and graduate students, the SSO rehearses on Monday and Thursday evenings and presents about ten concerts annually on campus. The orchestra performs repertoire from the Baroque to the present, frequently with outstanding student and faculty soloists as well as renowned visiting artists. Last season’s concerts included by Respighi’s Pini di Roma, Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du Printemps, and Mahler’s Symphony No. 2 with the Stanford Symphonic Chorus. Past collaborations with Stanford Live include a pops concert with vocalist Darlene Love; the US premiere of Danny Elfman’s Violin Concerto, featuring soloist Sandy Cameron and guest conductor John Mauceri; and Rob Kapilow’s “What Makes It Great?” on Schubert’s “Unfinished” Symphony. Each year, the SSO performs the Halloween Concert in collaboration with the Stanford Wind Symphony, collaborates with the Stanford Symphonic Chorus, and hosts the annual Concerto Competition to give talented Stanford students the opportunity to perform as orchestral soloists.