John Mauceri

Conductor
Founding Director

JOHN MAUCERI is the Chancellor of the University of North Carolina School of the Arts (UNCSA), the Founding Director of the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra, and Music Director of Walt Disney’s Legacy Concert. His distinguished and extraordinary career has taken him not only to the world’s greatest opera companies and symphony orchestras, but also the musical stages of Broadway and Hollywood, as well as the most prestigious halls of academia.
 
Mauceri has served as music director of four opera companies: Washington (National), Scottish (Glasgow), the Teatro Regio (Turin, Italy), and Pittsburgh. He is the first American to have held the post of music director of an opera house in either Great Britain or Italy. He was the first music director of the American Symphony Orchestra in Carnegie Hall after its founding director, Leopold Stokowski, with whom he studied. He was Consultant for Music Theater at Washington’s Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts for more than a decade, and, for 15 years, he served on the faculty of Yale University. For 18 years, Mauceri worked closely with Leonard Bernstein and conducted many of the composer’s premieres at Bernstein’s request.
 
On Broadway, he was co-producer of On Your Toes, and served as musical supervisor for Hal Prince’s production of Candide as well as Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Song and Dance. He also conducted the orchestra for the film version of Evita. Among his many awards and honors are a Tony, Grammy, Billboard, Olivier, and two Emmys.
 
Mauceri holds the lifetime title of Founding Director of the Hollywood Bowl Orchestra, which was created for him in 1991 by the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and with whom he led over 300 concerts to a total audience of over 4 million people. He has written for and appeared on radio and television and has delivered keynote speeches and papers for major artistic and educational institutions, such as Harvard University, the American Academy in Berlin, the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, the American Musicological Society, and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
 
Mauceri has taken the lead in the preservation and performance of many genres of music and has supervised/conducted important premieres by composers as diverse as Debussy, Stockhausen, Korngold, Hindemith, Bernstein, Ives, Elfman, and Shore. He is a leading performer of music banned by the Third Reich and especially music of Hollywood’s émigré composers, and can be seen and heard on many recent DVD releases of classic films.
 
As Chancellor of UNCSA, Mauceri leads America’s first public arts conservatory. Located in Winston-Salem, the university includes music, dance, drama, filmmaking, and design & production curricula for high school, college, and graduate degrees.
 
Upcoming events include concerts with the North Carolina Symphony, Porgy and Bess with Washington National Opera, Shostakovich’s Hamlet with the Danish Radio Orchestra, and Carlisle Floyd’s Susannah in Bilbao, Spain.