Musical Artists

Baltimore Conductor Michael repper

"Michael Repper conducted the fine chamber orchestra with confidence and expressive nuance." Tim Smith, Baltimore Sun

Mike conducts the Orchestra of the Moscow Ballet in productions of the Great Russian Nutcracker each season in Baltimore. Along with regular engagements in the mid-Atlantic, his international credits include a recent debut with the São Paulo Symphony Orchestra in Brazil, the Artes Nazionale Orchestra in Florence, Italy, and Wollongong, Australia. He regularly conducts the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra and has been invited several times as to conduct the St. Louis Symphony and other major professional orchestras. He is an avid pianist, having performed several times alongside his own orchestras while conducting from the piano. Mike is the Music Director of the Northern Neck Orchestra in Virginia and served as Assistant Conductor of the Concert Artists of Baltimore for 5 years.Michael enjoys a full schedule of guest conducting, most recently premiering a concert of new music with the Grammy-Nominated Metropolis Ensemble, and leading the NY-based ensemble Camerata Notturna.

He has worked with world-renowned soloists, including Demarre McGill, Julia Bullock, Colin Carr, Christine Lamprea, and many others. Together with the New York Youth Symphony, he will make three world-premiere performances per season, highlighting the talents of promising emerging composers including Hilary Purrington, Thomas Kotcheff, Ryan Lindveit, Peter Shin, Natalie Diettrich, Theo Chandler, and more. Mike was also the Music Director at the Baltimore Basilica, the first Catholic cathedral in the United States, and he is the New Music Consultant for the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra. Mike also enjoys musical scholarship. At Stanford University, he taught Music Theory to Undergraduate and Graduate Students, and his research in the field of melodic range spectrography and perfect pitch perception was awarded Honors at the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics. He is a proud graduate of the Orange County School of the Arts in Santa Ana.

University of Kentucky Symphony Orchestra

The University of Kentucky Symphony Orchestra, conducted by John Nardolillo, has been an integral part of the cultural life of UK and its communities since the founding of the School of Music in 1918. Selected by audition, the Orchestra is comprised of the finest string, wind, and percussion instrumentalists from both graduate and undergraduate students at the University of Kentucky. The Orchestra presents 10 or more performances each season including symphonic concerts, operas, major works with choirs, and the Concerto Competition concert. It regularly collaborates with distinguished guest artists and the University of Kentucky music faculty. Its repertoire covers a wide range of the master works of orchestral literature from the Baroque to the present.

The University of Kentucky Symphony Orchestra was formed in 1918 by Carl Lampert, composer of the UK Fight Song and Alma Mater. Over the last century, the orchestra has built a tradition of performing major symphonic masterworks. The orchestra also performs regularly with the UK Opera Theatre, which presents several fully staged productions each season. This concert season, the orchestra will give more than 20 performances for an audience of more than 40,000 people and for thousands more on television in Kentucky, Indiana and Ohio. The orchestra has recorded two CD’s, Music of the Horse (2005) in collaboration with Keeneland and the In Times Like These - music of Arlo Guthrie (2007).

John Nardolillo, Director of Orchestras and UK Symphony Orchestra

John Nardolillo, Music Director and Conductor of the University of Kentucky Symphony Orchestra, has conducted concerts at the Kennedy Center in Washington DC, the Kimmel Center in Philadelphia, and Carnegie Hall in New York and appeared with more than 30 of the country’s leading orchestras, including the Seattle, San Francisco, Detroit, Atlanta, Dallas, National, Milwaukee, and more. He was Music Director and conductor for the Opening Ceremonies of the 2010 Alltech FEI World Equestrian Games, a performance that featured 1,500 performers, 200 horses, and was broadcast worldwide for a television audience of 500 million! Mr. Nardolillo is the Founder and Music Director of the Metropolitan Symphony Orchestra in Washington DC, an orchestra of top young professional musicians, drawn from the ranks of the world's leading orchestras, who travel from around the United States, Canada and Europe to perform together each season. The orchestra has appeared in the leading concert halls in the eastern United States, has been filmed for a television documentary, and has recorded Copland, Bernstein, Barber, Bach and Mozart.

Mr. Nardolillo made his professional conducting debut in 1994 at the Sully Festival in France, and has since made conducting appearances in the U.S., France, Germany, Italy, Norway, Sweden and Denmark. He has led major American orchestras in subscription series concerts, summer and pops concerts, education concerts and tours, and for television and radio broadcasts. He has recorded for Naxos and Albany Records, and has been featured in articles in the New York Times, Washington Post, Boston Globe and Vanity Fair magazine. Born in Bend, Oregon, he began musical training at three years old on the violin. He earned a Bachelors degree in violin from the Cleveland Institute of Music, and Masters’ degrees in violin and conducting from the Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore.

 

Live Orchestra Accompanies Moscow Ballet in Kalamazoo!

Moscow Ballet is pleased to announce that Western Michigan University Symphony Orchestra, named "Best Classical University Symphony Orchestra" in Downbeat magazine's 2005 nationally recognized student music awards competition, will accompany the Moscow Ballet company live in Tchaikovsky’s Great Russian Nutcracker on Tuesday, December 6, 7:00pm under Conductor and Professor Bruce Uchimura’s baton. The Kalamazoo Gazette's classical music reviewer picked the orchestra's WMU centennial celebration concert as the most memorable performance of the year. Master works performed by the orchestra include the major symphonies of Beethoven, Brahms, Dvorák, Mozart, and Tchaikovsky in addition to Mahler’s Symphony No. 1 (“The Titan”), Elgar’s Enigma Variations, and Richard Strauss’ tone poems Don Juan, Till Eulenspiegel, and Tod und Verklärung (Death and Transfiguration). The USO is comprised of 100 musicians and includes undergraduate and graduate music majors who take pride in the professional level of the ensemble’s rehearsals and performances.