All-Star Orchestra Shines in New Season

News

Emmy® Awards

Behind the Baton
FALL 2017 – Filmed in August 2016, the third season of the Emmy-award winning All-Star Orchestra series is now airing across the nation on local PBS stations. The series features "all-star" players hand-picked by Schwarz from symphony orchestras across the country and focuses on works by history's top composers. It also incorporates music history lessons on each work narrated by Schwarz. All-Star Orchestra's partnership with Khan Academy, a free online educational nonprofit, further expands All-Star Orchestra's music education emphasis.
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MAY 6, 2017 – All-Star Orchestra took home its 5th and 6th Emmy® Awards at the 60th Annual New York Emmy Awards, which took place at the Marriott Marquis Broadway Ballroom in New York City. “1001 Nights – The Legend of Scheherazade,” a program featuring Rimsky-Korsakov’s Arabian Nights orchestral fantasy, Scheherazade, won in the category: Special Event Coverage (Other than News and Sports) with Gerard Schwarz as Music Director/Conductor, Habib Azar as Video Director, Dmitriy Lipay as Audio Recording Producer, Andrew Mayatskiy as Video Editor, and Paul Schwendener as Executive Director. The same program also won in the category Audio awarded to Dmitriy Lipay as Audio Recording Producer. learn more...
MARCH 1, 2017 – In Behind the Baton: An American Icon Talks Music, Schwarz looks back on his nearly five decades as a respected classical musician and conductor. The maestro's high-octane lifestyle of conducting gigs, festival performances, teaching engagements, and television projects, as well as his commitment to raising awareness of the arts have earned him the affection of audiences all over the world. And Schwarz's distinctive, down-to-earth approach to the music shines through in Behind the Baton as he looks back on his life and career, on the podium and off.
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In the Media

In Print

BBC Music Magazine
Behind the Baton Review


July 2017 — "As an uplifting retrospective of a highly successful career populated by some of the biggest names of the last half-century, and as a revealing, behind-the-scenes look at the near-impossible balancing act that is the lot of a music director, [Behind the Baton] makes for fascinating reading." 
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In Print

Gramophone
Record of a Lifetime


September 2017 — "Gerard Schwarz is celebrating his 70th birthday with a 30-disc retrospective, and yet the conductor's desire to reach new audiences remains undimmed... His autobiography, Behind the Baton, published earlier this year by Amadeus Press, traces the trajectory of his career from the eureka moment in the cinema through his appointment as co-principal trumpet of the New York Philharmonic aged 24, his 26-year tenure as Music Director of the Seattle Symphony, and the founding of the Emmy-winning All-Star Orchestra TV series."
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In Print and Online

The New Yorker
The Return of Mid-Century American Symphonies

Oct 23, 2017 — "The conductor Gerard Schwarz’s upcoming concert with the Juilliard Orchestra, at Alice Tully Hall on Thursday, highlights an essential but overlooked period of American composition: the great mid-twentieth-century symphonies.

Well, three decades later, while Barber and Bernstein have become fixtures of the American repertory, both here and abroad, Schuman, Diamond, and Piston have not been so lucky... One person who never got the message is the distinguished conductor Gerard Schwarz, now a free agent after long stints as the music director of the Seattle Symphony and the Mostly Mozart Festival, who has spent a lifetime advocating for the American symphonic school."
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