Paul Phillips
Lisa Jablow

PAUL PHILLIPS
Music Director and Conductor

Paul Phillips, Music Director of the Pioneer Valley Symphony and Chorus since 1994, has led the PVS&C to new artistic heights and recognition as one of the leading arts organizations in western Massachusetts. He has been acclaimed as a conductor “who was born to stand on a podium” and has appeared with over sixty orchestras, opera and ballet companies worldwide, including the Dallas Symphony, Detroit Symphony, San Francisco Symphony, Netherlands Radio Chamber Orchestra, Pro Arte Orchester of Vienna and Iceland Symphony Orchestra. As Director of Orchestras and Chamber Music at Brown University, he has led the Brown University Orchestra in performances at Carnegie Hall with the Dave Brubeck Quartet and Avery Fisher Hall with Itzhak Perlman. This winter the Brown Orchestra will become one of the first US university orchestras to perform in China, presenting a two-week tour that will include concerts in Shanghai and Beijing.

Phillips graduated cum laude in music from Columbia University. He holds graduate degrees in composition and conducting from Columbia and the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music, respectively, and pursued additional studies at the Eastman School of Music, the “Mozarteum” in Salzburg, the Académie internationale d’été in Nice, the Music Academy of the West, Aspen and Tanglewood. His teachers include Kyriena Siloti and Jeanne-Marie Darré in piano, Warren Benson and Samuel Adler in composition, and Kurt Masur, Gunther Schuller and Leonard Bernstein in conducting.

After beginning his career as a coach/conductor at the Frankfurt Opera and Stadttheater Lüneburg in Germany, Phillips returned to the US, assuming conducting posts with the Greensboro Symphony, Greensboro Opera and Savannah Symphony before assuming his post at Brown University in 1989. Recent and upcoming engagements include Opera Providence, Boston Academy of Music, the Bangor Symphony, Masterworks Chorale and 2007 Massachusetts All-State Orchestra.

A strong believer in the importance of music in the lives of young people, Phillips has worked extensively with student musicians and audiences as Youth Concert Conductor of the Maryland Symphony for fourteen years and as conductor of numerous youth and All-State orchestras. He enjoys popular music and has led pops concerts featuring Dizzy Gillespie, Ray Charles, Tony Bennett, Dionne Warwick, Glen Campbell and other jazz and popular artists.

With a conducting repertoire of over 900 works, he has conducted much of the standard orchestra, including dozens of operas and musical theatre works ranging from The Magic Flute to Sweeney Todd. He is the winner of eight ASCAP Awards for “Adventurous Programming”, including one with the Pioneer Valley Symphony and six with the Brown University Orchestra. Other honors include 1st Prize in the NOS/Dutch Broadcasting Foundation International Conductors’ Course, 1st Prize in the Wiener Meisterkurse Conducting Course and selection as a Finalist in the Exxon/Arts Endowment Conductors Program.

Apart from conducting, Phillips is an accomplished pianist, composer and author. As a pianist, he has performed at the Mohawk Trail Concerts, Piccolo Spoleto Festival, Carnegie Recital Hall and Lincoln Center, and has recorded for film and television. His music has been performed internationally and received many prizes, including awards from the New England String Ensemble, American Music Center, ASCAP and the Rhode Island State Council on the Arts. This fall, the performance ensemble Aurea performs his new show War Music, based on the poetry of Christopher Logue, at the Chicago Humanities Festival.

As a scholar, he is best known for his work on the music of Igor Stravinsky and Anthony Burgess. His article in Music Analysis titled “The Enigma of Variations: A Study of Stravinsky’s Final Work for Orchestra” has been cited by Richard Taruskin as “the best exposition in print of Stravinsky’s serial methods.” Considered the world’s leading authority on the music of composer/novelist Anthony Burgess, Phillips wrote the entry in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, is a featured commentator in the BBC television documentary The Burgess Variations, and author of the forthcoming book A Clockwork Counterpoint: The Music and Literature of Anthony Burgess, which is due to be published in 2007 by Manchester University Press.

LISA JABLOW
Assistant Director and Chorus Director

Lisa Jablow holds a D.M.A. in Choral Conducting from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she studied under the late Dr. Robert Fountain. She has done additional study in conducting and voice at the Aspen School of Music, the Tanglewood Festival, Westminster Choir College and the Carnegie Hall Conductors’ Workshops under the likes of Pierre Boulez, Robert Shaw and Joseph Flummerfelt.

As a vocal soloist she has appeared onstage with such organizations as New York City Opera, Opera Orchestra of New York, the New York Virtuoso Singers, the Milwaukee Symphony, Boise Opera and Skylight Opera.  Local Vermont audiences have seen her in productions or concerts with Lost Nation Theater, Vermont Opera Theater, Lamoille County Players, Opera Burlington, the Vermont Philharmonic, the Vermont Contemporary Music Ensemble, the Warebrook Contemporary Music Festival, Friends of Music at Guilford and Burlington Choral Society.  In addition, she is an alumna of the world-renowned “Internationale Ferienkurse für Neue Musik” in Darmstadt, Germany, where she was awarded top honors for the interpretation of new music.  She was recently seen on the Discovery Channel in a segment of the series “Women Who Kill,” performing an excerpt from the monodrama “Erszebet,” by Vermont composer Dennis Bathory-Kitsz about his ancestor, the 16^th-century serial killer Countess Erszebet Bathory.  Last Fall she toured New England and the Midwest with the Missouri-based Esterhazy Quartet, performing Arnold Schoenberg’s String Quartet #2.

Ms. Jablow is also active as a conductor and has worked in recent years with Maestra Fiora Contino in NYC and with Kenneth Kiesler at the Conductors Retreat at Medomak in Maine.  She has been the music director of the Montpelier Chamber Orchestra and has guest-conducted the Lamoille Choral Society, the Onion River Chorus, UVM’s Catamount Singers and the Burlington Choral Society.  In addition to co-directing the Musical Theater program at Johnson State College, where she is the senior member of the music faculty, she has done music direction for Lost Nation Theater, Burlington’s Lyric Theater and Lamoille County Players, where she is currently music directing “Spitfire Grill.”  She has also served as Assistant Conductor for productions at Opera Illinois and the Green Mountain Opera Festival. 

As a corollary to her performing, she has written a number of feature articles for the New York City Opera, Metropolitan Opera and Carnegie Hall Playbills and, in the last several years, has served as supertitle operator for Green Mountain Opera Festival, Berkshire Opera and Opera Illinois and will be joining the supertitle staff at New York City Opera this coming season.  

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