Larry Rachleff, Music Director

During the 2007-08 season, the Rhode Island Philharmonic celebrates Larry Rachleff’s eleventh anniversary as Music Director . This is also his seventeenth year as Professor of Conducting and Music Director of Rice University’s Shepherd School Orchestras in Houston and his sixteenth as Music Director of the Chicago Philharmonic Orchestra, formerly named Symphony II, an orchestra made up of members of the Chicago Lyric Opera Orchestra.

Mr. Rachleff has appeared as guest conductor with such prestigious orchestras as the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Houston Symphony, the Seattle Symphony, the Indianapolis Symphony and the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra. In 1993 he was selected as one of four American conductors to lead the Cleveland Orchestra at Carnegie Hall under the mentorship of Maestro Pierre Boulez.

Mr. Rachleff is a former faculty member of Oberlin Conservatory where he served as Music Director of Orchestras and Conductor of the Contemporary Ensemble. He also served as the Conductor of the Opera Theater at the University of Southern California. In 1988 Mr. Rachleff served as the Music Director of the highly acclaimed American-Soviet Youth Orchestra tour. He has conducted and presented master classes at the Chopin Academy in Warsaw, Poland, the Zurich Hochschule for Music and Theater and the Sydney and Queensland, Australia Conservatory Orchestras.

He is in constant demand as a conductor and master class clinician and is frequently invited to lead the very finest American conservatory orchestras, such as that of the Juilliard School and New England Conservatory. He has spent his summers guest conducting at the Grand Teton Music Festival, Aspen, Tanglewood, Interlochen, the Music Academy of the West, Summer Music and the National Repertory Orchestra and has led the Camerata Australia on a tour of Japan. Next summer he will serve in his fourth season as Music Director of the Sunflower Music Festival in Kansas.

As an enthusiastic advocate of public school music education, Mr. Rachleff has conducted All-State orchestras and festivals in virtually every state of the United States, as well as in Europe and Canada. His college conducting career began at the University of Connecticut and continued at The University of Michigan. He has presented weeklong residencies at several leading universities and music schools, and he has served as conducting teacher for the American Symphony Orchestra League, the Conductors’ Guild and the International Workshop for Conductors in the Czech Republic. As a dedicated advocate of contemporary music, Mr. Rachleff has collaborated with several composers including Samuel Adler, Luciano Berio, George Crumb and John Harbison.

He and his wife, soprano Susan Lorette Dunn, live in Houston with their young son, Sam.