PAUL PHILLIPS

LATEST NEWS 

 

Paul Phillips opens the Fall season with a concert starring Bobby Weir & Wolf Bros with the Wolf Pack performing with the Stanford Symphony Orchestra in Frost Amphitheater on Sunday, 29 October 2023. Produced by Stanford Live and Goldenvoice, the concert will feature arrangements by Giancarlo Aquilanti of favorite Grateful Dead songs.

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The Devil Prefers Mozart: On Music and Musicians 1962-1993, a collection of 75 writings on music by Anthony Burgess that Paul compiled and edited, will be published by Carcanet Press on 25 January 2024. It can now be pre-ordered at Amazon.uk.co. 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 is currently composing a new work for 12 pianos to be premiered in San Francisco's Grace Cathedral on 9 February 2024.

 

Mavra/Iolanta, released in December 2022, is a Blu-ray videorecording of the 2019 Bayerische Staatsoper production, which entwines these two operas using Paul's chamber arrangement of Stravinsky's Mavra. A new Naxos recording of the Complete Guitar Quartets of Anthony Burgess, recorded by the Mela Guitar Quartet, was released in September 2023; Paul wrote the liner notes for this recording.

 

Stanford Philharmonia will participate in the California Festival, “A Celebration of New Music” taking place statewide from 3-19 November 2023, performing music of Mozart, Griffes, Schubert, and the West Coast premiere of Dedication by William Bolcom. This California Festival Fall Concert will take place on 11 November 2023 at 7:30pm in Bing Concert Hall. 

 

This fall, Paul will guest conduct the December CODA Honor Symphony Orchestra in a program of music by Dvorak, Valerie Coleman, and Saint-Saëns plus his own Brownian Motion. The California Orchestra Directors Association sponsors this high school honor orchestra, which will be hosted by Stanford University and will perform in Bing Concert Hall on the afternoon of 2 December 2023. That same weekend, Paul will conduct the Stanford Symphony Orchestra on 1 & 2 December 2023 at 7:30pm in Bing Concert Hall in a program of works by Richard Strauss, John Adams, and Johannes Brahms.

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Many videos of SSO, SP, and SSS performances from 2017 to the present were added this summer to the Stanford Orchestras YouTube channel. Paul conducts nearly all of the 144 videos on this YouTube channel

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This summer, Paul led the Stanford Summer Symphony in a sold-out concert at Bing Concert Hall on Saturday, 29 July 2023. The program opened with the Afro-American Symphony (No. 1) by William Grant Still and ended with the "New World" Symphony (No. 9) by Antonin Dvorak. Between these two works was the West Coast premiere of The Silent Years by William Perry, featuring Michael Chertock as the piano soloist. The Silent Years is a suite of three rhapsodies for solo piano and orchestra based on Perry's music for The Beloved Rogue (starring John Barrymore), 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  attended the Stanford performance.

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A profile of Paul appeared in the April 2023 issue of Punch Magazine. In July 2023, he lectured and guest conducted at the Montecito International Music Festival in Thousand Oaks, California, and has been invited to return in 2024. Paul is currently in his second year as President of the Western Region of the College Orchestra Directors Association and serves on CODA's Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Accessibility (DEIA) Committee. At Stanford, Paul led the Music Department's DEI Committee from 2021-23. 

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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.