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Zürich, Switzerland
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1 MaleOrigin
Zürich, SwitzerlandGenre
ComposerStyle
ClassicalMood
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Born
1946
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1946 to Present...
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Leon Botstein (born December 14, 1946 in Zürich, Switzerland) is a Swiss-American Jewish conductor and scholar, and the President of Bard College.
Botstein is the music director and principal conductor of the American Symphony Orchestra (ASO) and conductor laureate of the Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra (JSO), where he served as music director and principal conductor from 2003-2010. He is also the founder and co-Artistic Director of the Bard Music Festival. In 2015, Botstein founded The Orchestra Now (TŌN), a pre-professional orchestra and master's degree program at Bard College. TŌN performs regularly at such venues as Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, where Botstein, as music director of TŌN, leads Sight & Sound, a series of discussions and performances exploring the parallels between orchestral music and the visual arts. The orchestra is in residence at Bard's Richard B. Fisher Center for the Performing Arts, performing multiple concerts there each season. Botstein is a member of the Board of Directors of The After-School Corporation, a nonprofit organization dedicated to expanding educational opportunities for all students. Botstein also serves as the Board Chairman of the Central European University, a graduate-level, English-language university accredited in the United States and Hungary and located in Budapest. He is a member of the Board of Trustees of the Open Society Foundation. On January 23, 2020, Botstein was named chancellor of the Open Society University Network, of which Bard College and Central European University are founding members. In July 2016, Austria's Grafenegg Festival, a major international Austrian festival for classical music, appointed Botstein artistic director of the Grafenegg Campus and Academy, effective in 2018.
Botstein is the author of Jefferson's Children: Education and the Promise of American Culture and Judentum und Modernitaet. He graduated at age 16 from the High School of Music and Art in New York City, and earned a bachelor's degree from the University of Chicago and a Ph.D. from Harvard University in music history. He credits David Landes and Harold Farberman as his mentors.
Botstein became the youngest (or possibly second youngest) college president in U.S. history at age 23, serving from 1970 to 1975 at the now-defunct Franconia College, after which he was named president of Bard College.
As music director of the American Symphony Orchestra, Botstein emerged as a significant proponent of "thematic programming," which attempts to assemble concert programs having a common theme grounded in literature, music history, or art. He also focused the ASO's programming on the performance of infrequently-performed works by major composers and the best examples of works by lesser-known composers, with a particular emphasis on U.S. premiere performances, many of which have been recorded by the ASO for the first time. In addition to the orchestra's main concert series at Carnegie Hall, Botstein inaugurated the Bard Music Festival with the participation of the ASO, a summer series which focuses on one composer each summer for an intensive series of concerts, lectures, and panel discussions. He also presents a series called "Classics Declassified," devoting each program to a piece from the standard orchestral repertory. Botstein lectures about the piece for about an hour, using the orchestra to provide illustrations for his talk, then performs the entire piece, then opens the floor to questions from the audience directed at him and at members of the orchestra. This series, originally presented at Columbia University's Miller Theater, proved so popular that it was moved to Symphony Space for the 2007–2008 season. He also inaugurated an important series of recordings of neglected masterpieces with the Telarc label, using the ASO and a variety of European orchestras. In addition to his work with the ASO and JSO, Botstein has performed as a guest conductor with, among many others, the London Philharmonic Orchestra, New York City Opera, Los Angeles Philharmonic, BBC Symphony Orchestra, London Symphony Orchestra, St. Petersburg Philharmonic Orchestra, and NDR Symphony Orchestra. The Los Angeles Times called 2013's Los Angeles Philharmonic performance under Botstein "the all-around most compelling performance of anything I've heard all summer at the Bowl." In fall 2013, Botstein also conducted the Sinfónica Juvenil de Caracas in Venezuela and Japan, making him the first non-Venezuelan conductor invited by El Sistema to conduct on a tour. Many live recordings of his performances, including the prestigious operas performed every summer during the Bard SummerScape festival, are widely available on compact disc and on Internet sites such as iTunes, Amazon, and Spotify.
Botstein's many books, essays, and articles on music and culture have earned him a reputation as a leading musicologist. His essays in the Princeton University Press series of books devoted to composers featured during the annual Bard Music Festival exemplify his efforts to address the complex social, political, and artistic influences and context of his subject. Of his recent essay in this series, on Jean Sibelius, the Times Literary Supplement wrote that Sibelius's "critical reputation is epitomized by Leon Botstein."He has also written extensively about music and culture in 19th-century Vienna, Jewish European culture, and modernism. His book Judentum und Modernität: Essays zur Rolle der Juden in der deutschen und österreichischen Kultur, 1848–1938 was written in German and has been translated into Russian.
Botstein's unique position as a leading music scholar, performer, and founder and coartistic director of the Bard Music Festival has enabled him to have an impact on both music scholarship and performance. As the Wall Street Journal's Barrymore Laurence Scherer observes, "the Bard Music Festival…no longer needs an introduction. Under the provocative guidance of the conductor-scholar Leon Botstein, it has long been one of the most intellectually stimulating of all American summer festivals and frequently is one of the most musically satisfying. Each year, through discussions by major scholars and illustrative concerts often programmed to overflowing, Bard audiences have investigated the oeuvre of a major composer in the context of the society, politics, literature, art and music of his times."
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