Alexander Platt, Resident Conductor

Born in New York City, Alexander Platt was educated at Yale College, where he was resident conductor at the Yale Center for British Art and graduated winning most of the major music prizes. Awarded a British Marshall Scholarship, he then spent three years at King's College Cambridge, where he led all of the important University musical societies and won high praise in the London press for his revival of Britten's Owen Wingrave; he also made his professional conducting debut at Aldeburgh and reconstructed the lost chamber version of the Mahler Fourth Symphony, which has since become a classic of the chamber-orchestra repertoire.

During this time he spent his summers as a Conducting Fellow at both Aspen and then Tanglewood, where he studied with Oliver Knussen, Gustav Meier, Murry Sidlin, Leonard Slatkin, and Simon Rattle. Following Cambridge he served as apprentice conductor of the Minnesota Orchestra, the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra and the Minnesota Opera, where his conducting of Colin Graham's production of Madama Butterfly won him high acclaim.

His work with COT has ranged from leading the triumphant Chicago premiere of Britten's Death in Venice to directing equally succesful operas with young people -- most notably, the new Maurice Sendak/Tony Kushner version of Krasa's Brundibar, and his own acclaimed adaptation of Tchaikovsky's Iolanta. In 2006 he leads the Chicago premiere of John Adams' Nixon in China.

Alexander Platt is also the Music Director of both the Racine and Waukesha Symphonies in Wisconsin and the Marion Indiana Philharmonic, all three of which he has completely transformed. He has been enormously acclaimed for his evangelism with both young and older audiences(he also finds time to serve as a professor at Wisconsin's Carthage College), and his extremely broad repertoire has ranged from all the late Haydn masses to a complete cycle of the Sibelius symphonies and his own adaptation of the Grieg/Ibsen Peer Gynt.

He spends his summers directing the Maverick Concerts, the oldest summer chamber-music festival in America, following in the footsteps of such legendary musicians as William Kroll, Leon Barzin, and Georges Barrere.

Alexander Platt has guest-conducted the Houston, Charlotte, and Columbus Symphonies, the Freiburg Philharmonic in Germany, and the Aalborg Symphony in Denmark, with whom he led a highly successful Mahler-week. Last May he recorded Scottish works for violin and orchestra with Rachel Barton and the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, in Edinburgh's Usher Hall; the Cedille Records disc makes its debut in summer 2005. He has led the premieres of works by Britten, Rorem, Shostakovich and Judith Weir, has recorded for National Public Radio, the South-West German Radio, and the BBC, and has earned acclaim from The New York Times, The Financial Times, The London Independent, The Wall Street Journal, Opera News, and The Chicago Tribune.