BY KAREN BOSSICK
Edwin Outwater, conductor and curator of the Sun Valley Music Festival’s upcoming Winter Season, will join Music Director Alasdair Neale in the popular Upbeat with Alasdair program.
The free presentation will be at 7 p.m. Tuesday, Feb. 25, at Ketchum’s Community Library.
It will be a rare encounter with two accomplished conductors on one stage as the two maestros discuss their experiences behind the baton.
“It is so rare to have the opportunity to sit down with a fellow conductor and talk about what we do and how we do it,” said Neale. “I can’t think of anyone I’d rather spend time with than my friend and colleague Edwin Outwater, and I hope audience members bring us their questions.”
Neale is entering his 26th year as Music Director of the Sun Valley Music Festival. He also is Music director of the Marin Symphony in California and New Haven Symphony Orchestra in Connecticut. Known for his enthusiastic leadership, he has guest-conducted numerous orchestras around the world.
Outwater’s family has a home in Sun Valley where his father Edwin Outwater III is chairman of Sun Valley opera.
The younger Outwater has been called one of the most innovative conductors on the scene today by Michael Tilson Thomas. Music Director laureate of the Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony in Ontario, Canada, he regularly appears with the San Francisco, New World, Chicago, National and Virginia symphonies.
His Chinese New Year program won the MetLife award for community outreach in 2004 and his Florida Philharmonic Family Series and youth program was heard annually by more than 40,000 fifth-graders in South Florida. He conducted the San Francisco Symphony as it played with Metallica in a San Francisco sports arena.
He grew up in a musical family. His father was head of engineering at Warner Records. His mother worked for Ella Fitzgerald.
Outwater said he and Neale have spent many hours discuss the art of conducting at dinners in San Francisco and on hikes in Sun Valley.
“I hope people will join us for this rare opportunity to hear two conductors discuss how it all works,” he added.
Admission is free but space is limited. Reservations are encouraged and will be taken beginning today--Wednesday, Feb. 5--at 9 a.m. at www.svmusicfestival.org or by emailing info@svmusicfestival.org or calling 208-622-5607.