The Mizzou New Music Summer Festival is fortunate to have Maestro Kirk Trevor as one of our guest artists in 2010.
Trevor (pictured) will conduct the Festival’s “Composers That Rock” concert featuring pianist Lisa Moore on Thursday, July 15, but audiences in Columbia have known him since the year 2000 as the conductor and music director of the Missouri Symphony.
He also was music director of the Knoxville Symphony Orchestra from 1985 to 2003, and continues as conductor and music director of the Indianapolis Chamber Orchestra, a post he’s held since 1988.
Born and educated in England, Trevor trained at London’s Guildhall School of Music, graduating in cello performance and conducting. He has guest conducted more than forty orchestras in twelve countries. His début with the London Symphony Orchestra was in January 2003 and Carnegie Hall debut in 2007. Trevor is one of the most recorded conductors of the past decade, with more than 50 recordings of new American music with the Slovak Radio Symphony Orchestra in Bratislava, and 20 recordings with other orchestras for the EMI, Koch, Albany, Fatra, Crystal and Carlton Classics labels.
Like all the guest artists in the Mizzou New Music Summer Festival, Trevor has a particular interest in music education, and he specifically is becoming widely recognized as one of the leading conducting teachers in the world.
Trevor has been a master teacher for the American Symphony Orchestra League and the Conductor’s Guild, and in 1991 co-founded and has been Artistic Director of the International Workshop for Conductors. (Held in the Czech Republic for a month every summer, IWC is the world’s largest conducting school, each year training more than 80 conductors from 20 countries.) Trevor also is a frequent guest teacher at Northwestern University and in Switzerland, annually giving a week of master classes at the Zurich and Basel Conservatories.
In the first embedded video, you can see and hear Maestro Trevor conducting the chamber orchestra and choir of the 32º International Festival in Brasilia, Brazil in a performance of Samuel Barber’s “Adagio for Strings.” In the second, you can see and a brief interview with Trevor, in which he discusses preparing a performance of film music with the ICO.