PAUL PHILLIPS

LATEST NEWS 

 

This summer, Paul Phillips will conduct the Afro-American Symphony (No. 1) by William Grant Still, The Silent Years by William Perry (California premiere), and the "New World" Symphony (No. 9) by Antonin Dvorak with the Stanford Summer Symphony on 28 July 2023 in Bing Concert Hall at 7:30pm. Michael Chertock will be the piano soloist in The Silent Years – a suite of three rhapsodies for solo piano and orchestra based on Perry's music for The Beloved Rogue (starring Douglas Fairbanks), Blood and Sand (starring Rudolf Valentino), and The Gold Rush (starring Charlie Chaplin). Chertock and Phillips premiered The Silent Years and recorded it with the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra (Ireland) for Naxos on the album Music for Great Films of the Silent Era under the supervision of William Perry, who will attend the Stanford performance.

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A profile of Paul appeared in the April 2023 issue of Punch Magazine. On 2 July, he will guest conduct and lecture at the Montecito International Music Festival in Thousand Oaks, California, and on 2 December, at the invitation of the California Orchestra Directors Association (CODA), he will conduct the 2023 CODA Honor Symphony Orchestra in Bing Concert Hall. Paul is currently in his second year as President of the Western Region of the College Orchestra Directors Association and has also been appointed as a member of that organization's new Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility (DEIA) Committee. At Stanford, Paul has served as Chair of the Music Department's DEI Committee from 2021-23. 

 

The Devil Prefers Mozart: On Music and Musicians 1962-1993 is a collection of 75 writings on music by Anthony Burgess that Paul compiled and edited, with publication by Carcanet scheduled for January 2024. Paul is featured in the 2023 film Fall and Fly, a documentary about a new work for 12 pianos that he conducted on 14 September 2022 at the 7th Annual Flower Piano Festival at the San Francisco Botanical Garden and has been commissioned to compose a new work for 12 pianos to be premiered in San Francisco in February 2024.

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In May, Paul conducted concerts in Bing Concert Hall with Stanford Philharmonia and the Stanford Symphony Orchestra featuring winners of the 2023 Concerto Competition. On 13 May, flutists Jenny Xiong '24 and Daniel Sun '25 performed Franz Doppler's Concerto for Two Flutes in D Minor, and alto saxophonist Zachary Lin '26 played André Waignein's Rhapsody for Alto Saxophone and Orchestra, with Schumann's Manfred Overture and Sibelius's Symphony No. 7 completing the SP program. On 19 and 20 May, pianist Roger Xia '24 performed Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto No. 2 in C Minor; the California premiere of Jennifer Higdon's Cold Mountain Suite opened the concert, which concluded with Symphonie Fantastique by Hector Berlioz.