John Mauceri, chancellor of the University of North Carolina School of the Arts, visits campus for a program that is open to the public.
The James P. Elder Lecture featuring John Mauceri
Thursday, April 4, 2013
6 p.m.
Whitley Auditorium
John Mauceri’s distinguished and extraordinary career has taken him to more than 25 of the world’s greatest opera companies and more than 50 symphony orchestras, to 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. And he served as consultant for music theater at Washington’s Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts for more than a decade, and, for 15 years, on the faculty of Yale University. 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 he 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.
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 more than 300 concerts to a total audience of more than 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.
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.
At UNCSA, he has music directed the 50th anniversary production of West Side Story; a restoration of the original 1943 production of Rodgers & Hammerstein’s Oklahoma!; the world concert premiere of Dmitri Shostakovich’s 1963 film score to Hamlet, performed with alumni and faculty with the North Carolina Symphony as well as the Aspen Festival; the American premiere of Erich Wolfgang Korngold’s complete score to Much Ado About Nothing (fully staged) and led performances of the UNCSA Symphony Orchestra on campus, as well as at the Grove Park Inn (Asheville) and for the opening of the new facilities at the North Carolina Museum of Art (Raleigh).
About the Elder Lecture
The James P. Elder Lecture is Elon’s first endowed lecture series devoted to the exploration of critical scholarship and its impact in the public forum.
Elder graduated from Elon in 1960. He founded the Liberal Arts Forum as an undergraduate in 1958, and went on to serve on the history faculty at Elon from 1963 to 1973. As faculty advisor to the Liberal Arts Forum, he helped bring more than 150 distinguished lecturers from major universities to the Elon campus. He was instrumental in the creation of Elon’s study abroad program. Five times during his tenure, Elon students voted him as the college’s Outstanding Professor.