BIOGRAPHY

ALEXANDER PLATT FULL BIOGRAPHY

Noted for his skills as a passionate conductor, orchestra-builder, curator, and guide to audiences across America, Alexander Platt has enjoyed a unique career spanning the worlds of symphony, chamber music, and opera.  He is the Music Director of the La Crosse Symphony, the Waukegan Symphony, and the Wisconsin Philharmonic Orchestras, and spends his summers as the Music Director of the Maverick Concerts, in Woodstock, New York, the oldest summer chamber-music festival in America. He also recently returned to guest-conduct the Boca Raton Symphonia, where he served as Principal Conductor from 2007 to 2010. His contract as Music Director of the Wisconsin Philharmonic, where he has served as Music Director since 1997, was recently extended to the spring of 2028, and in La Crosse he has been renewed through the season of 2034-35.

Born in New York City, Alexander grew up in Westport, Connecticut, then at its zenith as a middle-class haven for actors, writers, artists and musicians.  His early mentors were the pianist Natalie Ryshna, a student of Olga Samaroff-Stokowski; the actor Alvin Epstein, who had created roles for Samuel Beckett, Richard Rodgers, and Orson Welles; the celebrated New York City Opera soprano Brenda Lewis, who had created roles for Barber, Blitzstein and Jack Beeson; and Frank Brieff, conductor of the New Haven Symphony, pupil of Nadia Boulanger, violist in the NBC Symphony, and a protege of Toscanini.

Trained as a violist as well as a chorister in the Episcopal church tradition, Alexander was a Younger Scholars Fellow of the National Endowment for the Humanities before he entered college.  He was educated in Berkeley College, Yale University, where for three years he directed the Berkeley Chamber Players and started an acclaimed concert series at the Yale Center for British Art.  During this time he studied conducting privately with Gustav Meier, as well as 18th-century performance practice with Jaap Schroeder, the concertmaster of the Academy of Ancient Music.  He graduated winning the Bach Society Prize and the Sudler Prize, the University's highest undergraduate award in the arts.

Under a British Marshall Scholarship Alexander spent the next three years at King's College, Cambridge, where as a student of 19th-century music and performance practice he reconstructed the lost Vienna chamber version of the Gustav Mahler Symphony No.4, on commission from the Benjamin Britten Estate; it has since become a classic of the repertoire, with many recordings to its credit.  While at Cambridge he was the first American to be awarded the coveted post of Assistant Conductor of the Cambridge University Musical Society, and also served as Conductor of the Cambridge University Opera Society, where his revival of Britten's neglected opera Owen Wingrave earned high praise in the London press. Platt also served as the student member of the King's College building committee, and even found time to deputize in its famous Choir.

Following conducting fellowships at both Aspen and Tanglewood (where his teachers included Leonard Bernstein, Leon Fleisher, Seiji Ozawa, and Simon Rattle), in 1991 Alexander Platt was made the first Apprentice Conductor of the Minnesota Orchestra, the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, and the Minnesota Opera, in a unique program designed by Murry Sidlin and funded by the University of Minnesota.  In addition to sharing subscription concerts with Maestro Edo de Waart, his conducting at the Minnesota Opera of Colin Graham's production of Madama Butterfly met with particular acclaim.

Alexander then secured his first music directorship in nearby Wisconsin, leading the Racine Symphony Orchestra from 1993 to 2005 and transforming it from an orchestra on the brink of closure into a thriving institution.  During his twelve years in Racine, the RSO vastly expanded its symphonic, pops and chamber music offerings, started an extensive program to bring music to all third-grade students in Racine County, and established a fund for free private music lessons for needy children; and for the first time, the orchestra recorded one of its concerts for Wisconsin Public Radio. Throughout these years Platt also spent a great deal of time conducting choral societies in Milwaukee, leading over several seasons a complete cycle of the late Haydn Masses; his 1997 performance of Haydn's Mass in Time of War with ensemble Musical Offering earned him high acclaim in the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, as did his conducting debut at that city's beloved Skylight Opera Theatre, in the John Mortimer version of Die Fledermaus. Later that year, Alexander was also appointed Music Director of the Waukesha Symphony (now the Wisconsin Philharmonic), continuing the traditions of one of the region's finest small-budget orchestras (whose previous directors include the legendary pedagogue Otto Werner-Mueller) and leading it through the financial crisis of 2008 as well as the COVID pandemic; it now enjoys residences at both the Sharon Lynne Wilson Center and the Oconomowoc Center for the Arts, thus musically serving all of Waukesha County.

Making his debut with Chicago Opera Theater in 1997 conducting Charles Newell's production of Don Giovanni, Alexander Platt was appointed its Resident Conductor and Music Advisor in 2001, serving twelve years in that capacity during what is widely regarded as the company's golden age under general director Brian Dickie.  During this period, he led the Chicago premieres of both Britten's Death in Venice (earning a 5-star review in the London Financial Times) and of John Adams' Nixon in China, generally seen as the most successful production in the history of the company.  Platt also conducted the first full Chicago staging of Schoenberg's Erwartung, the world-premiere of the Tony Kushner/Maurice Sendak version of Hans Krasa's epic Brundibar, the world-premiere recording of Kurka's The Good Soldier Schweik, and the Chicago premieres of Britten's A Midsummer Night's Dream, his own version for young people of Tchaikovsky's Iolanta, and of the Peter Brook La Tragedie de Carmen -- all to high praise in Opera News, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and both the Chicago papers.  In 2012 Platt led the Chicago premiere of the Shostakovich Moscow Paradise, to unanimous acclaim. His recording from that era of Max Bruch's Scottish Fantasy with Rachel Barton Pine and the Scottish Chamber Orchestra (Cedille Records, 2005) is still heard regularly on radio stations across America.

Having made his professional conducting debut in England at the legendary Aldeburgh Festival, and his London debut at the Wigmore Hall, Alexander also spent these years guest-conducting the City of London Sinfonia, the Freiburg Philharmonic in Germany, the Wisconsin Chamber Orchestra, Camerata Chicago, and for three seasons the Aalborg Symphony in Denmark, as well as the Houston, Charlotte, and Indianapolis Symphonies. In 2007 Platt made his debut at the Banff Festival in Canada, with his work being singled out for praise in Opera Canada magazine.  That year he also made his New York debut conducting the Brooklyn Philharmonic in Central Park, the first of several successful appearances with the orchestra. He then spent three seasons as Principal Conductor of the Boca Raton Symphonia (2007-10), making his debut on 48 hours’ notice to replace an ailing James Galway and being appointed to the post soon after.  Leading the orchestra (in the opinion of The Palm Beach Post) to being the finest of the ensembles to emerge from the collapse of the Florida Philharmonic, he shared the podium with maestros Phillippe Entremont, James Judd, and Gerard Schwarz, remaining a musician and audience favorite.  In 2013 Platt made his debut at the Ravinia Festival, leading his own chamber-orchestra version of Leonard Bernstein's Songfest with members of the Lyric Opera of Chicago, to acclaim in the Chicago Tribune.

A true journeyman conductor, Alexander Platt served as music director of both the Grand Forks Symphony in North Dakota (2010-15), and the Marion, Indiana Philharmonic (1996-2017).  Yet, for much of the last quarter-century his work has been centered in Wisconsin. Since his appointment as Music Director of the La Crosse Symphony in 2010, the Orchestra has enjoyed a complete revival, going from the brink of closure to now holding $1.5 million in assets and serving as a cornerstone in the community's emergence as one of America's finest smaller cities in which to live (Forbes.com).  In recent years the LSO has enjoyed sold-out houses, added performances, hitherto-unknown artistic standards, and numerous successful collaborations with the city's youth orchestras and dance companies.  For the 2023-24 season – the LSO's 125th anniversary – the La Crosse Symphony will add three additional programs to its season, fully joining the ranks of the Upper Midwest's regional orchestras with ten symphony, pops, and chamber-orchestra programs to the Driftless Region.  In celebration of its milestone year, the LSO has commissioned two extraordinary new orchestrations from two of America's most prominent living composers:  Wisconsin native Daren Hagen's rendering of the Johannes Brahms Sonata for Two Pianos – the "Symphony No.0" – and from Jonathan Bailey Holland, Madrigal Divine:  an orchestral suite drawn from the many solo piano works of the neglected African-American composer, Robert Nathaniel Dett.

Since 2003 Alexander Platt has spent his summers in the Hudson Valley as Music Director of the Maverick Concerts, founded in Woodstock, New York in 1915 and since led by such celebrated musicians as Georges Barrère, William Kroll, and Leon Barzin.  Under his direction the Maverick has become a busy, thriving festival of world, jazz, folk and classical music, regularly hosting many of the world's finest string quartets and being the recipient of repeated grants from, among others, the New York State Council on the Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts. A signal success for the Maverick during Platt's tenure was his creation and conducting of the chamber-orchestra version of David Del Tredici's masterwork Final Alice (1976).  Produced in 2007 under a grant from The New York State Music Fund, The New York Times praised Mr. Platt's traversal of Del Tredici's notoriously difficult score. In recent years, live recordings from the Maverick Concerts' many performances have become a regular feature of National Public Radio's popular series Performance Today.

Since 2019 Alexander Platt has also enjoyed serving as Music Director of the Waukegan Symphony Orchestra, a community orchestra that remains an integral part of the Waukegan Park District on the Chicago north shore. He has been credited with bringing back audiences in greater numbers since the COVID pandemic and raising the level of performances, and recently was recognized for the WSO's creative programming by an award from the Illinois Council of Orchestras.

An entrepreneurial conductor and curator from the beginning of his career – recently he completed three seasons hosting occasional live webcasts of the Detroit Symphony Orchestra – Alexander has continued to create unique, original musical projects, to distinction and acclaim.  In April 2018, in its program Inspirational Women at the Sharon Lynne Wilson Center, Mr. Platt led the Wisconsin Philharmonic in the area premiere of Libby Larsen's Symphony No.1, Water Music, in the presence of both the composer and Wisconsin First Lady Tonette Walker.  In February 2020 he led the same forces in the area premiere of her Third Symphony, Lyric, in celebration of Wisconsin's leading the nation in the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1919.  In October 2018, in a performance underwritten by a grant from Chicago's famous Poetry Foundation, he created and conducted Mahler's Wunderhorn - A Soldier's Tale, a unique montage of new orchestrations of Mahler's songs from Des Knaben Wunderhorn, juxtaposed with the actor and Iraq War veteran Benjamin Busch reading celebrated poems from the World War I era.  Raising all funds for the project himself, Alexander led the performance to a full house at the Grainger Ballroom at Orchestra Hall, earning praise in the Chicago Classical Review as one of the more notable celebrations of the centennial of the Armistice that ended “the war to end all wars".  And in summer 2019 Alexander brought the final iteration of his chamber version of Bernstein's Songfest back to the Ravinia Festival, in a performance broadcast on WFMT in its concluding festivities for the Bernstein centennial.

Through all these years Alexander Platt has been an advocate for the music of our time, conducting the US premieres of works by Britten, Shostakovich, Ned Rorem, Colin Matthews, Daron Hagen, Harold Metlzer, Joseph Schwantner, Libby Larsen, Joan Tower, William Neil, Eric Ewazen, Judith Weir, and Simon Holt – as well as his brother Russell Platt, former classical music editor at The New Yorker magazine.  His work has been recorded by Minnesota Public Radio, Wisconsin Public Radio, National Public Radio, the South-West German Radio, and the BBC.

Autumn 2023