Brian Stone

Assistant Conductor, 1999-2003

“Conductor Brian Stone had everyone’s attention.” —Susan Larson, Boston Globe, 4/8/00

“The hero was conductor Brian Stone … (who) galvanized the Boston Conservatory Orchestra and made musical sense of every bar.” — Lloyd Schwartz, Boston Phoenix, 4/21/00

Such was the critical response to Mr. Stone’s performance of Virgil Thomson and Gertrude Stein’s opera Four Saints in Three Acts at the Boston Conservatory.

Brian started music playing the saxophone in the public schools of Santa Monica, California. Excelling on this instrument as a child, he went on to win several regional and national competitions. Later, he took up viola and piano, and started composing as well. Brian is a graduate of Bennington College in Vermont, where he studied composition, viola, and literature. Further studies in composition took place at the Aspen Music Festival where he conducted his own work, “Nesting”.

Brian received a Master of Music degree in conducting from the Peabody Conservatory and is now completing his Doctorate. For two years, he was the assistant conductor of the Peabody Symphony and is now the studio assistant to the conducting program. As well as presenting four recitals on his own, he has conducted the Peabody Symphony in concert on three different occasions. Additional studies in conducting took place at Le Domaine Forget with Otto-Werner Mueller and two summers at the Festival at Sandpoint with Gunther Schuller.

Active in both the symphonic and operatic fields, Brian conducted John Harbison’s chamber opera Full Moon in March at the Baltimore Theater Project and returned conducting a performance of Conrad Susa and Anne Sexton’s Transformations. He was the assistant to the conductor for the Baltimore Opera production of Wagner’s The Flying Dutchman and was the conductor for Stephen Paulus’ The Village Singer at Baltimore’s “Artscape” summer festival. He is currently Associate Conductor of the Hopkins Symphony Orchestra, where he is director of their chamber music program as well. In 2002-2003, he is the music director of the University of Delaware Orchestra.

In 1999, Brian was one of six conductors chosen to participate in the National Conductor Preview with the Utah Symphony. In the past, Mr. Stone has conducted the Spokane Symphony, the Greater Bridgeport Symphony (CT), the Fort Wayne Philharmonic, the Savaria (Hungary) Symphony, the Ohio University Symphony, the University of Maryland Orchestra, the Goucher College Orchestra, the Chesapeake Youth Symphony, and the Baltimore Symphony; as a guest on Marvin Hamlisch’s Pops Concert. In addition to his conducting activities, Brian is a popular lecturer at Peabody’s highly successful Elderhostel.

Mr. Stone’s principal teachers were Allen Shawn and Henry Brant in composition, Jacob Glick in viola, Harvey Pittel in saxophone, and Frederik Prausnitz and Gustav Meier in conducting.

Biography from 2003