CBA Ode to Joy

In 2011, Katz and the CBASO, joined by the CBA Chorus and guest choirs, nearly three hundred musicians in all, presented Orff ’s Carmina Burana to a capacity audience at Orchestra Hall, Chicago, in celebration of the CBASO’s 25th season. The ensemble returned to Symphony Center for Something Wonderful!, an all-Rodgers & Hammerstein concert, in spring 2015, and will make a third appearance at Symphony Center in a program called “Ode to Joy,” in June 2019. David Katz has led more than sixty orchestras and opera companies throughout the U.S., Canada, and Mexico as guest conductor, including concerts with the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, the Mississippi Symphony, and the Corpus Christi Symphony. Former associate conductor of the Elgin Symphony Orchestra under Margaret Hillis, and for twelve years music director of the Adrian Symphony Orchestra and co-founder of OPERA!Lenawee in Michigan, Katz is currently chairman and artistic director of Hat City Music Theater, Inc., in Connecticut, where he is founder and chief judge of The American Prize National Nonprofit Competitions in the Performing Arts. In 2016 Katz was honored by Musical America as one of their “Top Professionals of the Year” for his work creating and sustaining The American Prize. As the nation’s most comprehensive series of competitions in the performing arts, TAP has attracted thousands of contestants from all fifty states and award- ed more than $75,000 in prize money to performing artists nationwide. A professional playwright, actor, and arts advocate, Katz tours internationally in his acclaimed one-man play, MUSE of FIRE, about the secrets of conducting. He has presented the play scores of times throughout the Midwest, Northeast, and in Canada, including an extended engagement in Chicago. Two books by David Katz, Muse of Fire: A Symposium on the Art of Conducting, and Bruck Stories, a companion volume, will be published by Del Gatto Press next year. Katz is also at work on Wonderful Counsellor, a memoir about three decades of music-making with Chicago lawyers. David Katz holds baccalaureate and master’s degrees in composition and conducting from the Hartt School of Music of the University of Hartford. He was a student of the great Lithuanian maestro, Vytautas Marijosius, and was the first in the school’s history to be awarded an Artist’s Diploma in Conducting. Katz also studied for five years under Charles Bruck at the Pierre Monteux School for Conductors, in Maine, and later founded Opera Maine, the Monteux Opera Festival, and the Chamber Orchestra of Maine. He has partnered with such artists as Itzhak Perlman and Misha Dichter in concert and worked with some of the greatest twentieth century composers, including William Schuman, Hans Werner Henze, Milton Babbitt, and Elliott Carter. Katz’s own compositions are published by Carl Fischer and G. Schirmer, among others. www.museoffiretheplay.org / www.theamericanprize.org / triple portrait “Maestro Katz conducts Beethoven” by Diana Cutrone (2005)

CBA SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA AND CHORUS 11