LARRY RACHLEFF Professor of Music and Music Director, Shepherd School Symphony and Chamber Orchestras, 2003-04 is Larry Rachleff's eighth season as Music Director of the Rhode Island Philharmonic. This is his twelfth season as Professor of Conducting and Music Director of Rice University's Shepherd School Orchestras in Houston and his eleventh as Music Director of Chicago's 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 Seattle Symphony, the Houston Symphony, the San Antonio 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, most recently that of the Juilliard School. He has spent his summers guest conducting at Aspen, Tanglewood, the National Camp at Interlochen, the Music Academy of the West and the National Repertory Orchestra and has led the Camerata Australia on a tour of Japan.

This past summer he served in his third season as Music Director of the Sunflower Music Festival in Kansas. A champion 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 an enthusiastic advocate of contemporary music, Mr. Rachleff has collaborated with several composers including Samuel Adler, Luciano Berio, George Crumb and John Harbison. Mr. Rachleff?s conducting reviews are impressive.

The Boston Globe, in a review of the Rhode Island Philharmonic's Boston debut concert in June 2000, wrote, "Rachleff himself . . . is an important asset. He seems to relish the most complicated score and brings a nice sense of clarity and panache to the performance." The Chicago Tribune's most recent review of Mr. Rachleff stated, "He integrated his frequent tempo adjustments into seamless paragraphs and textures so clean that inner voices projected clearly. . . ." The Houston Chronicle hailed his last concert with the Houston Symphony as a "wonderful, polished performance . . . conducted with beauty and insight." He is married to soprano Susan Lorette Dunn.

Benjamin Loeb, a native Texan, is an accomplished conductor, accompanist, soloist, arranger, and educator. He has been hailed in El Paso as “a walking genius of unique ideas for making concerts fun to perform and hear, as well as subtly exposing youngsters to the pleasures of good music, [El Paso, Inc.]” while his recent performance with the Greater Bridgeport (CT) Symphony Orchestra as a “double-threat” both playing and conducting Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue was called “a total triumph that triggered a well-deserved, spontaneous standing ovation. Loeb and the GBS captured every ounce of imagination and emotion Gershwin packed into his ground-breaking musical portrait. [Connecticut Post]”

Other widely varied projects range from concerts of Beethoven and Bruckner Symphonies to recordings with Yo-Yo Ma of Italian 16th century madrigalists to tours with popular rock musicians to world premieres of the most cutting-edge avant-garde contemporary music. As the Associate Conductor of the El Paso Symphony Orchestra, Loeb founded and served as both Executive and Music Director of the El Paso Symphony Youth Orchestras – El Paso’s only national-level, NEA-recognized, multiple-orchestra system serving the best young musicians in the El Paso, southern New Mexico and Juarez region.  He held the position of Assistant Conductor for the Haddonfield Symphony for four years and Assistant Conductor for the Greater Bridgeport (CT) Symphony Orchestra for two, and served for three summers as Assistant Conductor for the TodiMusicFest in Portsmouth, VA.  He is the Founder and Artistic Director of the International Conducting Workshop and Festival, now in its ninth year, hosted by orchestras around the world.  He has also served as Director of Orchestras at the Music Institute of Chicago.

Benjamin Loeb’s projects have shown his tremendous range. With the Haddonfield Symphony (now Symphony in C) he led the MET Life award-winning musical outreach into schools in southern New Jersey in which he introduced children of all ages to the instruments of the orchestra.  At Rutgers University, the Peabody Conservatory and Harvard University, he led operas in full productions.  In El Paso he has conducted the El Paso Symphony in Young Peoples’ Concerts, Family Concerts and Christmas Concerts.  In one recent concert, both the El Paso Symphony and El Paso Youth Orchestra performed together combining to make over 150 musicians on stage. With the Pueblo (CO) Symphony, he both played and conducted Beethoven Emperor Concerto.  A frequent guest conductor in China, he often leads all-American programs while giving master classes and performing recitals with Chinese instrumentalists on his off days.  At the Peabody Conservatory, as a musical response to the attacks of September 11, Loeb organized and led what Tim Smith of The Baltimore Sun called “a remarkable concert” of Bruckner Symphony #7 and the world premiere of John Traill’s “In Memory”, a set of four orchestral miniatures based on the themes of the Bruckner.  He has been asked by Yo-Yo Ma to create and conduct arrangements of 16th century madrigals for his Silk Road Project, and he has toured with his sister Lisa Loeb leading orchestral accompaniments to her rock music.

This year marked the eighth of the International Conducting Workshop and Festival (ICWF) – an five-day workshop for conductors in Ciudad Chihuahua, Mexico, which has trained over 275 conductors from 28 countries since its inception, and which has included both full orchestra concerts and chamber music with international artists.  The ICWF has included past faculty members such as Larry Rachleff, Don Schleicher, Carl St.Clair, and Rossen Milanov. Last January’s workshop with over 26 active participants was led by Loeb, Gustav Meier, Director of Conducting Studies at Peabody Conservatory and Music Director of the Greater Bridgeport (CT) Symphony, and Jacob Chi, Director of Orchestras at Colorado State, Pueblo.

As a pianist, Benjamin Loeb has been praised by the Boston Globe: “[his] vigorous, cogent playing signaled the kind of equally weighted partnership, plus competition, plus mutual quest, etc. that [makes] this music live.”  Past season highlights include three performances of the Beethoven Emperor Concerto including one in which he both conducted and performed as soloist.  Some of the conductors with whom he has worked include Alan Gilbert, JoAnn Falletta, and Carl St. Clair.  His concerts have taken him around to world to major venues and on radio and TV in New York City, San Francisco, Dallas, Los Angeles, Tokyo, Berlin, Seoul, Shanghai, Wuhan, Guangzhou, Panama City, Helsinki, St. Petersburg and tours across the United States.  He has performed for Community Concerts and has been featured as Artist-in-Residence on NPR’s Performance Today with violinist Livia Sohn.  As one of the last Artistic Ambassadors for the United States Information Agency he toured Argentina and Chile with clarinetist David Gresham.  He has served three times as an official pianist for the Joseph Joachim/Hanover International Violin Competition, as well as for the Walter Naumberg Violin Competition, Marlboro Music Festival and Concerts Artist Guild auditions.  He served as staff pianist for the Steans/Ravinia Festival and SMU Summer Conservatory among others.  He can be heard on many labels having recorded CD’s with violinists Joseph Lin (Korngold and Busoni), Takako Nishizaki (Mozart), and Livia Sohn (Opera Fantasies) on Naxos, Judy Kang for the Canadian Broadcast Corporation, and with soprano Allison Charney on the DSCLabel.  He also has a recently released solo album on Naxos of Joplin Rags and has two recordings in production of Christmas and Children Songs with soprano Katrina Swift.

He holds a Graduate Performance Diploma from the Peabody Conservatory in Conducting, as a student of Gustav Meier, a Master in Music from the Curtis Institute and a Doctor in Musical Arts from the Juilliard School in Accompanying and a Bachelor of Arts from Harvard University.

He resides in El Paso, Texas with his wife, Quyen, his 4-year-old daughter, Anna Sofia Uni, and his 20-month-old, Lulu Ladybug. He continues to tour worldwide as conductor, pianist, educator and arts advocate, and to teach at the new El Paso Conservatory of Music.

Loeb’s far-ranging interests do not limit him to music; he has directed plays, cooked gourmet meals for 65, tutored over 500 people in test preparation for the Princeton Review, and played and enjoyed almost every sport.  He is also an active member of the Rotary Club of El Paso.  Moreover (or most important), he is a lifetime Dallas Cowboys fan.