Gerhard Samuel

“

Conductor and Composer

Born in Bonn, Germany in 1924,noted conductor and composer Gerhard Samuel
began violin studies at age six, occasionally playing in the string quartet
which met at his family’s home on Saturday evenings. His father was the
quartet’s cellist as well as being a physician and painter, and a colleague and
friend of the Blaue Reiter group of German Expressionists. He along with his
sister and parents escaped from Germany , one frantic step ahead of the Gestapo,
and came to the United States where the family settled in New York.

Samuel began his musical training at the Eastman School of Music, and after a
brief period of military service, went to Yale to study with Paul Hindemith. He
supported himself through college as a violinist in the Rochester Philharmonic,
and the New Haven Symphony. He was a conducting protege of Serge Koussevitsky’s
at Tanglewood, and institution long noted for producing fine conductors.

After a brief stint with conducting on Broadway, and a year in Paris
organizing concerts of American music, he went on to become the associate
conductor of the Minneapolis Symphony and Music Director of the Collegium
Musicum. In 1959 he was appointed music director and conductor of the Oakland
Symphony Orchestra, a post which he held until 1971. He was also the conductor
of the San Francisco Ballet, and frequently guested with the San Francisco
Opera. Gerhard Samuel founded the Oakland Chamber Orchestra and was appointed to
be the first conductor of the Cabrillo Music Festival, a summer festival which
principally features contemporary music. In 1971 he became associate professor
of the Los Angeles Philharmonic under Zubin Mehta and was named professor at the
California Institute of the Arts.

Gerhard Samuel was engaged in 1976 by the University of Cincinnati College
Conservatory of Music to preside over the Conservatory’s Philharmonia and to
assist with the development of new conductors. He was also at the helm of the
Conservatory’s opera program. These performances were proclaimed to be on equal
footing with professional companies. He tirelessly championed new works with the
Philharmonia and with the Contemporary Musical Ensemble as well. Under his
directorship, the Conservatory’s Philharmonia attained international standing.
It was the only American Orchestra invited to perform at the International
Mahler Festival in 1989, at the Theatre du Chatelet in Paris. It made
spectacular debuts at Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center. Gerhard Samuel has made
numerous recordings of relatively unknown and previously unrecorded repertoire
with this ensemble. Some of these include Hans Rott’s only symphony (he was a
colleague of Mahler’s) and the Mahler re-orchestration of Beethoven’s Ninth
Symphony. In 1996 he recorded Schubert’s last opera Der Graf von Gleichen
and the first recording of Charles Ives’ epochal Universe Symphony. That
year, he also conducted the world premiere of Harold Blumenfeld’s opera
Seasons in Hell.

For eight years, Gerhard Samuel was the principal conductor of the Cincinnati
Chamber Orchestra. His guest conducting duties in opera, symphony and ballet
have taken him to most of the 50 states, as well as from Canada to Peru, from
the Philippines to Poland and the former Soviet Union. His more recent
conducting duties have brought him to appearances with the New World Symphony in
Florida and his debut with the Central Opera House Orchestra and the National
Radio Orchestra China, both in Beijing. He gave lectures in composition and
conducting at the Shenyang Conservatory as well. He was enthusiastically
received for his guest conducting stint with the Umea Symphony Orchestra in
Sweden and the subsequent telecasts of this particular program have continued to
bring him into the spotlight with Swedish audiences. He recently returned to
California as guest conductor for the San Jose Symphony.

In 1997, Mr. Samuel decided to retire from his position with the Cincinnati
College Conservatory of Music to devote more time to guest conducting and to
writing music. However, the Philharmonia was invited to participate in Expo 98
in Lisbon, the only American Orchestra to receive an invitation. Under his
capable leadership, this orchestra received great praise for its many
performances during its tour. As part of the 1998-99 season, Maestro Samuel was
responsible for creating a tribute to the great Paul Robson with the
Cosmopolitan Symphony Orchestra in New York.

Now a resident of Seattle, Washington, Mr. Samuel is currently on the faculty
of the University of Washington, where he teaches composition. A prolific
composers, Gerhard Samuel has an impressive catalog of music spanning many
subjects and ideas. His work In search of Words was premiered by the
Cincinnati Chamber Orchestra in 1996 with Maestro Samuel conducting. Five
Chinese Love Songs for tenor and chamber orchestra was also premiered that
year, with Jindong Cai conducting. And, his song cycle The Butterfly was
premiered in November of 1996 and toured Berlin, Frankfurt, Munich, and Cologne.
Set to texts by children who were in the Terezin concentration camp, this cycle
is particularly poignant. He is working on several commissions including an
opera The Blood of the Walsungs.

A compact disc recording of his Nocturne on an Impossible Dream has
been issued by Acoma Canada. His two string quartets and Transformations
have been released on Centaur Records, the company for whom the Philharmonia
records as well. Vienna Modern Masters will issue his Requiem for
Survivors and Hyacinth from Apollo. A complete catalog of his
compositions is available on request. He is published by MMB, Inc. St. Louis,
MO. Gerhard Samuel is the recipient of the 1994 Alice M. Ditson Award from
Columbia University for his contribution to American music. Almost yearly over
the past few decades, he has received awards from ASCAP. He is also the
recipient of various grants from the NEA, the Ford and the Rockefeller
Foundations.

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[ama:classical music,3,popular]

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Press Quotes

Looking at
Orpheus Looking
“… a lovely and absorbing meditation on themes from
Monteverdi’s Orfeo, which form the basis for a highly modern and original
orchestral work. … the audience was clearly under its spell.”
-Jules
Langert, Oakland Tribune

“… Looking at Orpheus Looking is a distinguished addition to the
Romantic tradition of they symphonic poem.”
-Stephen Wigler, Maryland
Live

Harlequin’s Caprice
“… a wonderfully affectionate little
piece, full of mischievous antics which poke fun at all the Baroque habits of
zipping around on scales, dancing in triplets, bowing formally at cadences and
trilling or otherwise ornamenting everything in sight …”
-Nancy Malitz,
Cincinnati Enquirer

size=2>Apollo and Hyacinth
“… a complex though readily accessible
score, brightly colored, elegant and graceful …”
-Los Angeles
Times

Quartet No. 1
“This is a work in the main current of musical
tradition, a piece of genuine music. It has splendid singing lines for the
different instruments in turn. Proportions are fine, the form is true, as each
statement and its development arrives at clear articulations at the satisfying
moment. … It is immediate and directly communicative and has the sense of
unanswerable direction that identifies a remarkable composition.
…”
-Robert Commanday, San Francisco Chronicle

Quartet No. 2
“The urgency and intensity …are achieved in the
manner the voices are combined. Yet, coming through this urgency is a profound
sense of humanity. The dissonances are harsh, but they are not cold.
…”
-James Chute, Cincinnati Post

size=2>Requiem for Survivors:
“and suddenly it’s
evening”
“Samuel’s skillfully orchestral piece is remarkable for its density
and its clarity. … The strength of feeling sometimes has the intensity one
associates with Mahler, especially in the high string sonorities and in the
devilish, piercing woodwinds. …”
-Thomas Putnam, Buffalo Courier
Express

“… an emotionally riveting new orchestra piece … Requiem for
Survivors offered the listener a gut-level view of a composer as vigorously
involved with living as the cerebral … commitment of ideas to paper.
…”
-M.P., High Fidelity/Musical America

“… Samuel’s Requiem has an immediacy about it that draws listeners in,
even on first hearing. The audience voiced strong approval after the final
bars–bars which return to the Mozart that started it all. …”
-Nancy
Malitz, Cincinanati Enquirer

“… Gerhard Samuel’s Requiem for Survivors is a disturbing piece of
music. It’s not the dissonances or the meshes of complex rhythms that produce
the unsettling effect; … stir up feelings deep within those who hear it. …
Its emotional impact is extraordinary. …”
-James Wierzbicki, Cincinnati
Post

“… an impressive combination of new sounds and mixtures of sounds with
a cohesion and rhythmic vitality of their own, …”
-Sydney Edwards,
London Evening Standard

The Relativity of Icarus
“An impressive and moving piece, the
evocative music and stirring text were beautifully integrated. …”
-Rita
Moran, Ventura Star Free Press

Cold when the drum sounds for dawn
“… occupies only 12 minuets’
playing time. At that length it should have been repeated at this premiere
performance, not because it is inaccessible-like most of Samuel’s very
articulate music, it is comprehensible at first encounter-but because it is
beauteous. …”
-Daniel Cariaga, Los Angeles Times

Apollo and Hyacinth
“… a brief programmatic work in five
sections that vividly captures the Greek legend. It begins with a hymn in the
upper register of the woodwinds and bells that slowly intertwine in ethereal
dissonances. The music builds to an outpouring of melody, which nevertheless is
delicately, airily scored. Then, isolated sustained tones float throughout the
ensemble, eventually congealing into a coherent swirl, and the piece ends in
mid-air with the cut-off of a rising line. It is a complex though readily
accessible score, brightly colored, elegant and graceful. …”
-Timothy
Mangan, Los Angeles Times

Charles Ives’ “Universe Symphony” recorded for Centaur
Records
“… exacting and mesmerizing account. That Samuel has harnessed
monumental forces and formidable layers of sound into a cohesive unit is
singularly impressive. But in the end, it’s the sense of feeling and atmosphere
that is nothing short of revelatory.”
-Cincinnati Enquirer

a conductor of exceptional acumen. The result sounds totally
professional, and indeed, one doubts that many major orchestras could do better.
The recording features extremely wide dynamics ranges … Highly
recommended.”
-In Tune Magazine

“… absolutely fascination … absolutely mesmerizing.”
-American
Record Guide

“By now Ives fans are out the door, racing to the record store. The rest
of you, the ones still reading, stop. Go out and join them. Nothing I can write
will give you an idea of the experiences you are in for. All I can do is urge it
upon you … Sheer metaphysical sorcery … surpasses any other musical
experience of its kind.”
-Richard Taruskin, New York Times

“It has been 168 years for the unfinished score of Schubert’s Der Graf
von Gleichen to reach its premiere in stage-ready form. Thanks to a
collaboration of the musicologist Günter Elsholz, who completed the sparse
second act, the conductor Gerhard Samuel, and the CCM, the opera was brought to
life … possesses enough drama to make a stunning stage presentation … The
score has the playfulness of Mozart or Donizetti, the singing qualities found in
Fidelio, the compelling expressions of lieder …”
-Daniel Robb, Opera
Magazine