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.

Donald Schleicher has served as Professor of Conducting and Music Director of the University of Illinois Orchestral program in Urbana-Champaign since 1995. Previous positions include eight years as Music Director and Conductor of the Quad City Symphony Orchestra and for nine summers, he was Music Director and Principal Opera Conductor for the Pine Mountain Music Festival. In addition, he has been on the faculty of the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point and the University of Michigan.

Mr. Schleicher has been a conducting fellow at the Tanglewood Music Center and has studied with numerous respected conductors including Gustav Meier, Simon Rattle, Seiji Ozawa, Maurice Abravanel, and Roger Norrington.

Schleicher has conducted the Daegu (South Korea) Symphony Orchestra, the Orquesta Filarmonica de la UNAM of Mexico City, the South Dakota Symphony, and the orchestras of Bridgeport, Tallahassee, and Lansing. He has appeared as a guest conductor at the Great Lakes Chamber Music Festival and also served as a cover conductor for the Detroit Symphony Orchestra.

He is frequently invited to lead performances or provide conducting master classes at many of the countries major music schools such as the Oberlin Conservatory, Eastman School of Music, Baylor University, University of Minnesota, Ithaca College, Ohio State University, and Shepherd School of Music at Rice University. As an enthusiastic advocate of public school music education, Mr. Schleicher has conducted All-State orchestras, festivals, and youth orchestras in nearly every state of the United States.

As a conducting professor, Mr. Schleicher?s class at the University of Illinois is an international draw for talented young conductors. Many of his former conducting students have gone on to hold prestigious positions with organizations such as the San Francisco Opera, Richmond Philharmonic, and the Seattle Symphony. In the summers, he is Co-Director of the Illinois Orchestra Conducting Workshop.