Grammy-winner conductor and composer José Serebrier is one of most recorded classical artists today. He has received twenty-six Grammy nominations in recent years. When he was 21 years old, Leopold Stokowski hailed him as “the greatest master of orchestral balance”. After five years as Stokowski’s Associate Conductor at New York’s Carnegie Hall, Serebrier accepted an invitation from George Szell to become Composer-in-Residence of the Cleveland Orchestra. Szell discovered Serebrier when he won the Ford Foundation American Conductors Competition (together with James Levine). Serebrier was music director of America’s oldest music festival, in Worcester, Massachusetts, until he organized Festival Miami, and served as its artistic director for many years. In that capacity, he commissioned many composers, including Elliot Carter’s String Quartet No. 4, and conducted many American and world premières. He has made international tours with the Juilliard Orchestra, Pittsburgh Symphony, Philharmonia Orchestra, Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, Scottish Chamber Orchestra and the Orchestre de Chambre National de Toulouse.
His first recording, Charles Ives’s Fourth Symphony with the London Philharmonic Orchestra, won a Grammy nomination. His recording of the Mendelssohn symphonies won the UK Music Retailers Association Award for Best Orchestral Recording, and his series of Shostakovich’s Film Suites won the Deutsche Schallplatten Award for Best Orchestral Recording. Soundstage magazine selected Serebrier’s recording of Scheherazade with the LPO as the Best Audiophile Recording. He has recorded with the London Symphony Orchestra, London Philharmonic, Royal Philharmonic, Philharmonia, Bournemouth Symphony, Oslo Philharmonic, Bamberg Symphony, Royal Scottish National Orchestra, Scottish Chamber Orchestra, English Chamber Orchestra, Barcelona Symphony, Czech State Philharmonic Brno, Sydney and Melbourne Symphonies and many others, and “Serebrier Conducts Prokofiev, Beethoven and Tchaikowsky”, filmed at the Sydney Opera, has been shown over fifty times on U.S. television.
As a composer, Serebrier has won most important awards in the United States, including two Guggenheims (as the youngest in that Foundation’s history, at the age of nineteen), Rockefeller Foundation grants, commissions from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Harvard Musical Association, the B.M.I. Award, Koussevitzky Foundation Award, among others. Born in Uruguay of Russian and Polish parents, Serebrier has composed more than a hundred works. His First Symphony had its première under Leopold Stokowski (who gave the first performances of several of his works) when Serebrier was seventeen. His music has been recorded by conductors such as John Eliot Gardiner. His new Third Symphony, ‘Symphonie Mystique’ (Naxos 8.559183), received a Grammy nomination for Best New Composition of 2004. His Carmen Symphony CD, with the Barcelona Symphony Orchestra, won the Latin Grammy for Best Classical Album of 2004. The French music critic Michel Fauré has written a new biography of José Serebrier, published in 2001 in France by L’Harmattan. Serebrier’s first recording with the New York Philharmonic was released in January 2005.
For further information please visit www.joseserebrier.com.
Interview with Jose Serebrier in MusicWeb International, February 2007
José Serebrier Column in International Record Review
See José Serebrier conducting JS Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D minor on YouTube
The Naxos CD on which this track appears BACH-STOKOWSKI Transcriptions, Vol 2, with the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra,conducted by José Serebrier (8.572050) is scheduled for release in January 2009.
