Benjamin Zander Information

Benjamin Zander and the Boston Philharmonic Orchestra, the ensemble he founded in 1979, are doing something remarkable during the 2003-04 concert season. They are devoting the year to the music of a single composer: Gustav Mahler. For the conductornot to mention the orchestra, choruses, soloists, and audiencesthis is bound to be journey unlike any other, a fact driven home by the URL of the Boston Philharmonic's Web site devoted to this project: www.mahlerjourney.com. Before the first note was played this year, however, Mahler and Zander had already traveled a long distance. In the late 1970s, when he was conducting Boston's Civic Symphony, Zander was let go for daring to program Mahler's music, which the conservative board members considered too lengthy and difficult. Zander raised a new orchestra, the Boston Philharmonic, phoenix-like, from the ashes of the Civic Symphony, and the past 25 years have seen the sort of success story that we would call typically American, were it not for the fact that Zander was born in England. He trained as a cellist with Gaspar Cassadó in Florence and Cologne, and continued his formal higher education at London University, and on a postgraduate fellowship at Harvard and in New York. He is a former pupil of Imogen Holst and was mentored in his early years by Benjamin Britten. In 1967, Zander joined the faculty of the New England Conservatory of Music as a cello teacher and chamber music coach. Shortly thereafter, he took on conducting the Conservatory's Youth Philharmonic Orchestra, a prestigious group with whom he has toured and recorded extensively, and still does. As if this were not enough, Zander has developed other interests as well. He founded and has been the artistic director of the joint music program between the New England Conservatory and Walnut Hill School, a high school for the performing arts. In the business community, he has become known as an insightful lecturer on the topic of leadership, and he has given seminars about this subject all over the world. ...