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.
 
Maestro 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.

Chancellor Mauceri holds the lifetime title of Founding Director of the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra, which was created for him in 1991 by the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and with whom 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 & 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.” Last spring, he 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 was filmed for future broadcast (airing on Oct. 12, 2011, on UNC-TV).

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 John Mauceri, was released June 21 by PS Classics.

In August, Maestro Mauceri 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. Also in August, Mauceri returned to the Hollywood Bowl, where he led the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra in Walt Disney’s Fantasia. In September, Maestro Mauceri conducted the National Symphony Orchestra at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts during a private concert to commemorate, in words and music, the 10th anniversary of the tragedies that took place on Sept. 11, 2001.

In January 2012, Maestro Mauceri will travel to Denmark for a live televised performance with the Royal Danish National Orchestra, honoring Queen Margrethe on her 40^th anniversary as monarch.

The University of North Carolina School of the Arts is the first state-supported, residential school of its kind in the nation. Established as the North Carolina School of the Arts by the N.C. General Assembly in 1963, UNCSA opened in Winston-Salem (“The City of Arts and Innovation”) in 1965 and became part of the University of North Carolina system in 1972. More than 1,100 students from high school through graduate school train for careers in the arts in five professional schools: Dance, Design and Production (including a Visual Arts Program), Drama, Filmmaking, and Music. UNCSA is the state’s only public arts conservatory, dedicated entirely to the professional training of talented students in the performing, visual and moving image arts. For more information, visit www.uncsa.edu.

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