John Mauceri Keynote Speaker

John Mauceri’s distinguished and extraordinary career has brought him not only to the world’s greatest opera companies and symphony orchestras, but also to the musical stages of Broadway and Hollywood, as well as the most prestigious halls of academia. Regarded as the world’s leading performer of the music of Hollywood’s émigré composers as well as composers outlawed by the Third Reich, he has taken the lead in the restoration and performance of many kinds of music and is an internationally published author of three books, and a recording artist with over 70 albums to his name.

Maestro Mauceri has championed forgotten composers and underrepresented works for more than fifty years and was given the prestigious Ditson Award on the stage of Carnegie Hall by Columbia University for “a career spanning five decades [to] become one of the world’s leading authorities of… film scores and Broadway musicals.” Mr. Mauceri has been entrusted with editing and restoring works controlled by the families and estates of Richard Rodgers, George Gershwin, Duke Ellington, Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Harold Arlen, Marc Blitzstein, Kurt Weill, and Leonard Bernstein.

A graduate of Yale, he was appointed to the university’s faculty at twenty-one, serving for fifteen years and occasionally returning as a visiting professor. He has lectured at Harvard university, Columbia University, New York University, the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, the American Academy in Berlin, Vienna’s Universität für Musik und darstellende Kunst, the Royal College of Music (London), the Museum of Modern Art (New York) and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in Los Angeles. He is the former music director of four opera companies and three symphony orchestras and has conducted most of the world’s greatest symphony orchestras and opera companies. For eighteen years, he worked with Leonard Bernstein as both an editor and trusted colleague, conducting many of the composer’s premieres at Mr. Bernstein’s request.

For sixteen seasons, Maestro Mauceri led the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra, which was created for him by the Los Angeles Philharmonic Association, conducting an unprecedented 325 concerts that played to sold-out houses at the 18,000-seat amphitheater, with a combined audience of four million people. Beginning in 1991, he worked on creating the electronic systems that allow orchestras and conductors to accompany films in “live-to-picture” concerts, which has transformed the symphonic world in the subsequent decades.

Mr. Mauceri has worked with the greatest pop, jazz, rock, Broadway, and classical artists, including Madonna (the soundtrack to Evita) Billie Eilish, Lang Lang, Leontyne Price, Herbie Hancock, Dame Kiri Te Kanawa, Santana, Josh Groban, Garth Brooks, Patti LuPone, Jose Carreras, Ute Lemper, Carlo Bergonzi, Brian Wilson, and Julie Andrews. John Mauceri is the only conductor ever to conduct for Carnegie Hall (American Symphony Orchestra), the Metropolitan Opera (rehearsals for last national tour with Gounod’s Roméo et Juliette) and Broadway (Song & Dance with Bernadette Peters) on the same day in 1986.

Mr. Mauceri is the recipient of a Tony, Olivier, Grammy, Drama Desk, Edison, Billboard, Cannes Classique, an ECHO Music Prize, two Diapasons d’Or, three Emmys, and four Deutsche Schallplatten Awards., and has been published in Air Mail, The Huffington Post, The New York Times, the Times of London, the Wall Street Journal, Gramophone Magazine, Opera Magazine, and various musicological journals.

Mr. Mauceri served as music director (direttore stabile) of the Teatro Regio in Torino (Turin) Italy for three years after completing seven years as music director of Scottish Opera (22 productions and three recordings), and is the first American ever to have held the post of music director of an opera house in either Great Britain or Italy. He previously was music director of the Washington Opera (The Kennedy Center) and was the first music director of the American Symphony Orchestra in Carnegie Hall after its founding director, Leopold Stokowski, with whom he studied. From June of 2000 until July of 2006, he conducted 22 productions as music director of the Pittsburgh Opera.

In 1999, Mr.Mauceri was chosen as a “Standard-bearer of the Twentieth Century” for WQXR, America’s most listened-to classical radio station. According to WQXR, “These are a select number of musical artists who have already established themselves as forces to be reckoned with and who will be the Standard Bearers of the 21st Century’s music scene.” The recipients were chosen for “their visionary talent and technical virtuosity.” In addition, CNN and CNN International chose Mr. Mauceri as a “Voice of the Millennium”.

His latest book, The War on Music—Reclaiming the 20^th Century (Yale University Press) was a Los Angeles Times Best Seller in 2022.